dogs of europe (belarus free theatre, d. nicolai khalezin & natalia kaliada)

When is a work of art more than a work of art? When does its very existence transcend the macrame of the critical reaction or the aesthetic judgement?

Dogs of Europe is a play about the expansionist tactics of Putin’s greater Russia. I booked to see it a month or so ago, when the makers of this play knew exactly what to expect, but the rest of the world did not.

Now we do.

I thought that there is within the dark matter of Eastern European art, or perhaps that should be Mittel European art, a hard conceptual muscle. It’s there in Kafka or Havel (even Stoppard) or Gospodinov, or Bela Tarr, among those I know. As though the world is so volatile and precarious that regular human emotions are almost on loan, to be used sparingly in their art, as these societies are susceptible to the power block plays of forces beyond their control. Dogs of Europe embraces a meta fictional scenario of Greater Russia confronting Western Europe, a scenario that places Belarus, as well as Ukraine, on the border of this schism. The acuity of this theory has been born out to devastating effect. The play was conceived and up and running ahead of history meaning that, in a tragically Benjaminesque turn, history is playing catch-up with art.

All of which is to in no way communicate the comings and goings of Dogs of War, which seemed to marry the search for a poet of Bolaño’s Savage Detectives with the pan-European delirium of Three Kingdoms and the earthy truths of a folk tale.

Nor is it to communicate that sensation of inadvertently stumbling into history. The director came on stage at the end to give a brief speech, wherein she informed the audience that the designer of the graphics that had graced the stage was Ukrainian and was there now, fighting for his country. It is wrong, as well, to focus on Ukraine at the expense of Belarus, as this is a work of art carved out of the resistance to oppression, the need for art to speak to power, both the power within and the power without.

Perhaps that sentence should be broken down. ‘The need to speak’ alone is enough. The articulation of the existence of an idea gives that idea existence, even if only in those fleeting moments that it has been articulated. The idea is complex and simple. It is to do with Belarus and Ukraine, but it is also to do with the importance, as humans, of our right and capacity to say things others don’t want us to say. Without being sent to prison or killed. In the theatre, as has happened time after time, the transgressive is given word, the world is reconvened, the dictators do not rule.