BURNING DOORS by Nicolai Khalezin (Belarus Free Theatre/Luminato). At the Canadian Opera Company’s Joey and Toby Tanenbaum Opera Centre (227 Front East). Runs to Sunday (June 24), various 1 and 7 pm. $32.25-$78.32. luminato.com. Rating: NNN
It’s hard to argue with the urgency and visceral immediacy of Burning Doors, Belarus Free Theatre‘s powerful, if occasionally confusing, performance piece about persecuted artists in today’s Russia.
Among the most famous (at least in the West) is Maria Alyokhina, who was imprisoned for two years, along with the other members of the punk group Pussy Riot, after their brief anti-Putin performance in a Moscow cathedral in 2012.
Alyokhina recreates her nightmarish prison experiences which included invasive vaginal searches and “naked Thursdays” for the guards and inspectors to ogle female inmates and also sits for an impromptu “interview” with the audience that is rather awkwardly shoe-horned into the show.
The company, currently banned from performing in its own country, also looks at the case of Petr Pavlensky, a performance artist who once nailed his scrotum to Red Square, and the Ukranian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov, who’s in jail for alleged acts of terrorism and is currently on a hunger strike. (After the show we’re encouraged by its co-director, Natalia Kaliada, to chant, en masse, “Free Sentsov!” while a camera captures us.)
If you don’t know the particulars of these artists’ actions, you might be a little lost following the dialogue (translated, rather quickly, in surtitles which earns a little meta joke in the show). Excerpts from the work of Pavlensky and everyone from Dostoyevsky and Foucault are variously profound, moving and perplexing.
But the show’s ensemble dives into this 115 minute show with fearlessness and physical abandon, hurling themselves through the air while attached to bungee cords, mimicking hangings and taking part in choreography that mixes the everyday with brutal militarism.
One of the most powerful sequences comes when the company’s women, as prisoners, shout over each other in a cacophonous nightmare.
Everything’s enhanced by the brilliant designs of Joshua Pharo (lighting) and Richard Hammarton (sound), which often attack the senses with their unexpectedness.
And while not everything works, there’s room for some absurd humour as well, particularly in the figure of two bureaucratic clowns who deride the dissident artists with dismissive finality (although they get a bit of comeuppance in a funny prank).
