Theatre Development Fund – TDF: More than a thousand people attended the funeral of Anna Politkovskaya, a respected Russian journalist who was found murdered in the elevator of her Moscow apartment building in 2006. She was well known for investigating atrocities committed during her homeland's two wars with Chechnya. But when a high-ranking Russian official was asked to comment on her killing, he replied, "Sorry, I don't know who Anna Politkovskaya is."
3 comments:
This is the kind of theater we should be producing. Theater is such a wonderful platform for sending a message to a wider audience, and it should make them feel something. Audiences should leave inspired, upset, questioning, something. They should have thought about the content. I’m not a big fan of what you could call “popular theater.” I don’t know if that’s what we should call it but I mean the “SpongeBobs” and the “Frozens.” Too often now television, film, and theater are just things to watch, just entertainment, and when something becomes just entertainment, it feels like we’re wasting a valuable resource. Again, not that there is anything wrong with wanting to be entertained, but especially now we use entertainment to distract ourselves. We want to forget what is going on in the world, we want to ignore it because it’s hard. I think we should be doing the opposite.
Many Americans don’t really grasp how much mayhem and violence and revolution there is around the world. Many aren’t even aware of the events happening in our own country. And how many Americans even knew who Anna was? I didn’t.
Sidebar about journalism, I think it’s great and I think true journalists are invaluable, however, even the news has taken a turn. How many actual stories air vs how many fillers? How many bomb threats, school shootings, robberies do we hear about and how much air time do they get, vs the adopt a puppy, or inspiring high school student? I’m getting carried away. But the point is, I appreciate theater that takes advantage of its influence and I wish that were more common.
The review of this piece is really effective, in large part because it points out the timeliness of such a theatrical work. The article states that, "At a time when facts are constantly under attack and the U.S. President has branded journalists as "the enemy of the people," Intractable Woman feels eerily on point. For example, after being called "an enemy of the state" by an anonymous group allegedly made up of soldiers from the 68th Russian Army Corps, Politkovskaya responds, "It's true, I am an enemy….I'm an enemy of those who rape, loot and steal."" Theatre has the great privilege and ability to be both a reflecting surface of the current time and culture, and also a vehicle for change and advancement. Theatre for social change is a huge field, and a very important one in this current time period. Theatre at its best can incite change and discussion; it doesn't have to be all happy stories and song and dance. It certainly can contain those elements and still be a blistering attack on injustice, but that particular brand of storytelling take a lot of preplanning and skill. Evans says at the end of the article" ""That is what I think theatre can be, a place for an audience to come together as a community to bear witness to complex truths."" The focus on the community creation is vital to the importance of theatre, and the decision as to what stories we are choosing to tell.
Theatre is the perfect medium to tell the stories humanity never got the chance to tell or to know about, and after reading this article, I know that Anna Politkovskaya’s story is one the world needed to hear. Living in the United States, we often forget how valuable our freedom of speech is. In doing this, we overlook the dangers that come with sharing ideas in other parts of the world. Under an administration where the press is disenfranchised by the highest levels of our own government, overlooking the media’s importance is something we cannot afford to do. Politkovskaya, a female journalist living in Russia under leadership which practices heavy censorship, likely faced danger every day of her life. The stories she told of Chechnya and other acts of violence were likely avoided by other journalists because of their controversial nature, yet she, as the article states, ran at them head first. The images and stories Politkovskaya retold through her years of journalism were undoubtedly difficult to cope with as an observer, and yet she still excelled at informing others. Politkovskaya’s story is scary. It exposes the worldwide targeting of journalists that society doesn’t want to have to believe, but it is overwhelmingly full of truth. These are the kinds of difficult, yet strikingly important stories that we, as theatre artists, have an opportunity and responsibility to share with the world.
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