This trip was an opportunity to see the region for the first time, firsthand, and to engage its people and history through a lens that only art and culture can provide. All in all, it was twenty-one days on the road, four cities, four currencies, three festivals, a conference, lectures, countless new faces, meetings over coffee, over food, over drinks, and to cap it all off, twenty-three shows.
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In one of my classes this semester we looked at the work Roman Vishniac: photographs of Jewish life in Eastern Europe in the mid to late 1930s. Although Vishniac had been specifically commissioned to take photographs of the poor and the pious to raise money for a certain charity foundation, he later presented his work as representative of the entirety of Eastern Europe. And the collection of photos from his time there showed a much more diverse and interesting culture, he only published the photos that contributed to this picture of Eastern Europe as poor, rural, and religious. Because of he was one of the only the photographers who had actually gone to Eastern Europe at that time, his photographs were incredibly influential in shaping the Western picture of what life in Eastern Europe was like. Combine that with the years of anti-Communism propaganda and I must admit I clicked on this article because I was somewhat surprised by the notion of theater in Eastern Europe at all. At first, I was worried that this author too would fall into the trap of only seeing the poverty and despair in the countries they were visiting. But in the end this article, and especially the photographs within it, gave me a new picture of a, at least in the Western mind, much mythicized part of the world.
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