speakers

Natalia A. Koliada

In 2005, Natalia along with her husband Nikolai Khalezin founded the Belarus Free Theatre. In 2009, she co-authored the theatre conception Eurepica.Challenge, produced together with Manteatern and Lund-2014 as a candidate for European Cultural Capital, Sweden. Belarus FreeTheatre (further BFT) has started a Global Artistic Campaign in support of the UN Convention against Enforced Disappearances by performance Discover Love. In 2008 Natalia together with Nikolai Khalezin and Vladimir Scherban organized the only underground Arts School - Fortinbras in Belarus. She taught at the European Humanities University, Lithuania and DasArts School, Netherlands. BFT under Mrs. Koliada's leadership received the French Republic Human Rights Prize and the Europe Theatre Prize/New Theatrical Realities/Special Mention that was initiated by Sir Tom Stoppard, President Vaclav Havel and Mr. Harold Pinter and ArtVenture Freedom to Create Prize. BFT was named a Global Artistic Ambassador of Human Rights. She was detained three times by the Belarus special forces for her activities.

Creativity. Politics. Society. 

Creativity is a necessary element of the progress. The presence of it puts the progress outside the law in totalitarian and authoritarian regimes. There are two aspects of the problem: on one hand, totalitarianism kills creativity, while on the other, stimulates it by introducing new mechanisms of prohibition. Circumvention of prohibition and the time-factor of accumulation of creative decisions lead to the traditional outburst of innovation in post-totalitarian states. But is such an outburst of pent up creativity worth long periods of suffering of the people under totalitarian regimes? Boris Groys, having reconsidered the classic expression of Dostoevsky, has formulated it in a new way: ?The art will save the world from the beauty?. The art is obliged to reimburse its right to analyze the situation, the right to raise a question, to control and dominate intellectually. Today's mechanism of controlling the art - financial and political - is not likely to stimulate creativity. The system of financial inhibitions works independently from the country and state structure - the only difference is in the strength of the inhibition. The number of ?dangerous? products in the world decreases, the art field keeps on losing its direct mission, out of all the segments, only one is left - the entertainment of the audience. Today, all the mechanisms of creativity have to move in the direction of the search of new meanings of the art's existence; finding ways to approach the audience unaccustomed to actual discussion in the field of creativity; returning the art to the strict disputing regime of existence.

Link:

www.dramaturg.org