VOICES: Performing Intersections of War, Memory and Migration

Yana Meerzon*, Alexey Munipov**, Natalia Skorokhod***

VOICES Performing Arts Festival: Music. Dance. Theatre. Berlin (Germany). 2nd edition, 2-29 November, 2024. Curators: Marina Davydova and Sergey Nevsky.

VOICES Performing Arts Festival was launched in Berlin in 2023 as a cultural response to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which triggered widespread displacement and exile, including many Russian-speaking artists. The festival offers a vital platform for artists at risk, in exile and from marginalized backgrounds. Its 2024 edition, curated by Marina Davydova and Sergey Nevsky, focused on migration from former post-Soviet states, showcasing emerging and underrepresented voices.

Davydova, a prominent figure in post-2022 Russophone exile theatre, views the festival as a space to reflect on cultural and political shifts, particularly the role war and exile play in reshaping artistic expression. Nevsky, a composer of experimental music, highlights the urgent need to address the sense of dislocation and transformation that technological change and global migration impose on contemporary art. The festival adopts a broad understanding of exile—encompassing nomadic, cosmopolitan and hybrid experiences—and frames migration not only as a political reality, but also as fertile ground for artistic exploration. It promotes the concept of the “other” as a universal lens for grappling with today’s fractured world. This way it seeks responses to such questions as: How do exiled artists reflect on their past and imagine the future? How do they navigate shifting identities? And how do they contribute to the evolving global artistic and political landscape?

The 2024 VOICES featured experimental music, theatrical performances (including staged readings of new plays) and dance labs, gathering diverse artists. It presented five major projects, panels on theatre in exile and performances in original languages with German and English translations. The festival opened with Nachspiel, a concert-promenade uniting various artistic disciplines. Featuring Klangforum Wien and butoh dancers, the production was directed by Philippe Grigoryan, a prominent Russian director in exile, with choreography by Valentine Tszin and butoh performers. Grigoryan applied classical dramaturgy to weave contemporary music and butoh as parallel modes of self-exploration. The musicians’ movement through unfamiliar spaces and the audience’s search for vantage points metaphorically echoed the elusive clarity and uncertainty of exile. The unresolved ending reinforced the open-ended nature of exile as one of the leading human conditions, though some spectators found this ambiguity distancing rather than illuminating.

Staged Readings of New Plays

The festival showcased new plays by Russian-speaking female playwrights in exile, weaving intimate personal stories with broader political upheavals. Esther Bol’s Crime #alwaysarmukraine (2022) is a modern tragedy depicting a Russian woman anxiously awaiting news of her Ukrainian lover in Kyiv’s defense forces. Marina Davydova’s play The Land of No Return (2023) follows the journey of a woman—Davydova’s alter ego—from Baku through Moscow to Berlin, blending personal memories and the emotional experience of a modern Russian emigrant with historical context. The play reflects on interethnic tensions during the collapse of the USSR, which the protagonist witnessed as a child, and on the rise of Russia’s totalitarian regime, which ultimately forced her into exile as an adult. Polina Borodina’s Berlin Syndrome (2024) evolves into a sharp comedy that portrays a young widow’s exile in Berlin, using humor and irony to explore the shared sense of disconnection and alienation experienced by both migrants and locals in an increasingly fragmented urban landscape of a multicultural Berlin.

While all three plays center on female experiences of war, exile and loss, their tones diverge—Bol’s raw emotional immediacy contrasts with Davydova’s analytical distance and Borodina’s sardonic absurdity. Together, these female voices offer a layered exploration of identity and resilience in the face of global dislocation. They mobilize trauma narratives to expand the aesthetic and narrative frameworks used to represent war and exile.

Dramatic Theatre

The festival’s theatrical offerings, led by Russian directors in exile, stood out for their diverse artistic styles and their shared antiwar stance—a position that many of these artists had already begun articulating before their emigration. Whether through Ivan Vyrypaev’s philosophical dramaturgy and minimalist staging, Jan Kalnberzin and Evgeny Afonin’s provocative multimedia work, or the politically charged performances of Dmitry Melkin and Igor Shishko, each artist brought a distinct aesthetic shaped by a refusal to remain silent in the face of authoritarianism and militarism. Their creative resistance, rooted in their experiences within Russia’s shrinking public sphere, found renewed urgency and freedom on the international stage.

Two productions stood out for their contrast:

Cremulator (2024), starring Maxim Sukhanov and based on Sasha Filipenko’s 2022 novel, reconstructs the NKVD interrogation of the first director of the Soviet crematorium in Moscow in 1941, staging it as a surreal, nightmarish dance with death. Director Maxim Didenko fuses montage-driven Soviet avant-garde aesthetics with the emotional intensity of Stanislavsky-trained acting, creating a dissonant, highly stylized performance that oscillates between the grotesque and the tragic. Sukhanov’s restrained yet deeply expressive performance anchors this visually arresting, if at times deliberately opaque, meditation on the individual’s complicity in and resistance to state violence.

Rather than issuing direct political slogans, Cremulator critiques authoritarianism through formal experimentation and its chilling portrayal of individuals caught in the machinery of terror. While the production includes participatory moments—particularly engaging members of the Russian-speaking diaspora by inviting them to see their own displacement through the eyes of first-wave émigrés—its broader exploration is existential, presenting wandering not only as physical exile but as the human journey toward death.

Moranal (2023), whose title translates as “to forget” from Armenian, was directed by Ilya Moshitsky, who had relocated to Armenia in 2022. The production evoked the legacy of the great Soviet-Armenian filmmaker Sergei Parajanov through a poetic, collage-like theatrical language rich in metaphor and post-irony. For Moshitsky, Parajanov had been a pivotal figure whose work helped the young director reshape his artistic voice within a new cultural context.

However, Moranal resisted easy comprehension: it lacked a clear plot or central character, focusing instead on the figure of the visionary director whose centennial the cinematic world would celebrate in 2024. Performed in Armenian and conceived as a tribute to Parajanov’s cinematic masterpiece The Color of Pomegranate (1968), Moranal used improvisational energy and evocative scenography to probe memory, creativity and loss.

The actors did not inhabit roles (a-la Stanislavsky style); they moved among stacks of paper books, which formed the set. By the performance’s end, the actors seemed to transform into characters from this unknown book: they became part of the Earth’s cultural fabric. St. Petersburg artist Sergei Kretenchuk designed costumes that enhanced this visual metamorphosis. These costumes gradually merged with the actors’ bodies, so this seamless fusion of costume and performer deepened the play’s exploration of identity, memory and transformation.

At the same time, Moranal’s experimental style challenged traditional storytelling in dramatic theatre, and so it may have alienated audiences seeking straightforward tales of exile. Yet its philosophical, poetic form stood as a subtle but powerful act of antiwar protest: it was a meditation on the persistence of memory and creativity amid loss and erasure, a quiet resistance against forgetting.

Music

Unlike its theatre section, which mostly featured well-known theatre artists and collectives, the musical program was full of surprises. Many concerts went beyond simple auditory experiences; they were fully staged performative events shaped by professional theatre directors and choreographers.

A highlight was Tower of Babel, a Klangforum Wien concert featuring post-Soviet composers from Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Tajikistan, Russia, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan. The “post-Soviet” label often feels insufficient for such diversity, but the concert tested whether a shared imagery or sensibility exists among these displaced artists. For Berlin audiences, largely unfamiliar with this music, it revealed a fresh, urgent voice blending European avant-garde with outsider perspectives. The event prompted critical questions: Does origin define the artist? Or does individual voice trump geography, especially when “born” and “based” are increasingly decoupled? The concert emerged as a meditation on exile, belonging and self-definition.

All Planes Fly to Minsk was another key event, which focused on Belarusian music and the role of exile in artistic survival. The first half featured Belarusian Songs, a cantata by Russian composer Vladimir Rannev, based on poems by Minsk-based Belarusian poet Konstantin Steshik. Written after the failed 2020 uprising against Lukashenka, the cantata narrates resistance and loss in an accessible style similar in spirit to Kurt Weill’s collaborations with Brecht. The second half presented contemporary Belarusian composers—Marina Lukashevich, Kazimir Vik and Oksana Omelchuk—in world premieres performed by Neue Vocalsolisten. The following discussion, Belarusian Art in Exile: Who Cares?, starkly revealed the marginalization of Belarusian art abroad. Lukashevich’s Unbeachtet (Unnoticed) poignantly confronted the silence surrounding Belarusian political prisoners, making visible the erasure endured by those caught between exile and repression.

The festival’s closing concert, Being Adam, featured an ensemble mosaic of experimental music from Central Asia, with composers from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Bashkortostan and Baku-born Petros Hovsepiyan. Many now reside in Germany, Austria or Switzerland, highlighting the marginal status of experimental music in their homelands and the migratory dynamics shaping their art.

The concert opened with Duo Falak, an unusual collaboration between St. Petersburg guitarist Denis Sorokin and Tajik percussionist Shohin Qurbon. Sorokin, who relocated to Tajikistan to avoid military mobilization, became fascinated by falak, a complex traditional Tajik genre, comparing it to avant-garde works by Giacinto Scelsi. Together, they reinvented falak into a dynamic, rhythmic performance, so engaging it could belong in a techno club, a rare energy at contemporary festivals.

The highlight was Bosaga by Kazakh composer Sanzhar Baiterekov, a nearly 30-minute meditation centered on Tibetan singing bowls, remarkable for its precision and subtlety. Even the usually staid roundtable discussion with Central Asian composers became a unique performance, moderated by an AI avatar whose smooth control contrasted with the participants’ playful, failed attempts to disrupt it, adding an ironic commentary on control and agency in exile.

Most striking was how these composers embraced their cultural identities and histories to craft music that felt radical and contemporary: their work powerfully illustrates how post-Soviet migration can enrich contemporary music and cultural discourse in Europe.

Conclusion

In 2024, VOICES Performing Arts Festival revolved around familiar themes of war, displacement and exile; thus, it reflects a wider contemporary tendency to channel political turmoil into personal narratives. While timely and urgent, this thematic focus sometimes risks repetition, with several works covering similar emotional and aesthetic ground. In addition, although the festival sought to amplify underrepresented voices, it frequently leaned on established artists, raising questions about its inclusivity and forward-looking potential.

The curators’ thoughtful emphasis on exile as both a thematic focus and an identity marker offered a sense of hope and therapeutic reflection for both the artists and the audiences. Their careful work created space for healing and recognition. At the same time, there were moments when this framing risked reducing the complexities of political trauma to a recurring curatorial motif, somewhat softening the festival’s potential for disruption and critical engagement with the ongoing war conflict in Ukraine. Moving forward, the festival faces the challenge of balancing visibility with innovation: its curatorial agenda—and each selected work—should do more than echo prevailing discourses on war and exile. It must actively push artistic and political boundaries, challenging and expanding the frameworks through which these narratives can be shaped and understood. 

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*Yana Meerzon is Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Ottawa, Canada. She is the author of four books, including Performance, Subjectivity, Cosmopolitanism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and most recently Performing Nationalism in Russia (Cambridge UPress, 2024). 

**Alexey Munipov is a Berlin-based independent researcher, music critic and curator. Writing for media since 1996, he has also curated music festivals, recitals, theatre performances and exhibitions in London, Tel Aviv and Moscow. He is the author of the book Fermata. Conversations with Composers (2019) and founder of “The School of Attentive Listening” where he teaches critical listening and music appreciation. He holds a PhD in Cultural Studies. 

***Natalia Skorokhod is an invited Professor of the Free University in exile, Latvia. She holds a PhD and a postdoctoral degree in art studies, and currently resides in Berlin with the “scholar at risk” status. Her books include How to Adapt Prose (2010) and Leonid Andreev: A Biography (2013), as well as Postdrama Analysis (2015), along with numerous book chapters and articles.

Copyright © 2025 Yana Meerzon, Alexey Munipov, Natalia Skorokhod
Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, #31, June 2025
e-ISSN: 2409-7411

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