National Stage Show: Belarusian culture in the conditional mood

Maxim Zhbankov

Summary

In 2018, Belarusian culture was traditionally financed from what had been left over from other areas (0.52% of the 2018 budget).1 Coupled with the overall ideological apathy and the routine authoritarian manual steering, Belarusian culture demonstrated its signature ability to generate “white noise” in the social environment without considerable costs for both, a conditional activity within the permitted limits, its main mission still being no eloquent missions at all. Cultural policy functions as a way to distribute scarce funding in favor of loyal functionaries.

The lenient mode of ideological control and aesthetic half-life replaces a tough struggle with quiet sabotage of disloyal initiatives, and exercising control through the absence of uncontrolled activities in the designated area. A steady increase in the information cluttering of the cultural environment naturally leads to a general decline in the fineness and acuteness of cultural texts.

Trends:

Decor and design: performance experiences

The most pretentious (and most controversial) cultural project of 2018 was the public celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Belarusian People’s Republic. The new generation of cultural activists – bloggers Anton Motolko and Eduard Palchis together with Symbal.by owner Pavel Belous – suggested having nationwide fun instead of routine ideological confrontation. According to the organizers, the open air concert authorized by the authorities near the Minsk Opera Theater attracted an audience of nearly 40,000 people.2 At that very time, dozens of those who chose the usual protest were brutally detained on the Jakub Kolas Square.

Interestingly, none of those who used to personalize the “partisan rock” – Volsky, Mikhalok and Kullinkovich – showed up on stage, whereas the participation of pop star Alexander Solodukha was seriously considered during the preparation of the action. The latter, however, “contacted people who said that he should not be there”).3

The mass enthusiasm of supporters of non-partisan entertainment (political slogans were banned during the action) caused a negative response from those who perceived it as “a celebration in a reservation”. The police pressure on those who did not drop the white-red-white flags right away when leaving the site only confirmed the general conventionality of the short-term “liberalization” in one separate district of the capital. The system accepted the alien performance, but only as a one-time element of its own show.

The project of the Logvіnau Publishing House on the publication of five volumes of Svetlana Alexievich’s works in the Belarusian language was no less decorative. The nice idea under the conditional sign “Engagement of the Nobel Prize Winner in our Affairs” brought together a bunch of Belarusian intellectuals as translators, and became the leader of local crowdfunding, but still remained an ostentatious act of Belarusization of a reputed person. Alexievich did not switch to Belarussian, and the hope to distribute the books for free around the country was shuttered by the fear of local librarians.4 The action got stuck at the stage of a symbolic gesture. The country just did not know what to do with its praised writer. This perplexity seems mutual, though. Alexievich’s intellectual club took a break in November 2017, and fell silent for the whole year 2018.

The hero of the past season, Andrus Gorvat, the writer-downshifter, former yard-keeper of the Kupala Theater, passed into a new quality. His bestseller Radio Prudok was staged in the Kupala Theater he used to broom. The speedy legalization of the once rejected author on the national stage had its price: the theater removed the social context, dubious heroes and unwanted allusions from Gorvat’s story.5

The financial support for the project from one of the mobile phone operators, which has been actively using “mild Belarusization” codes recently, was a significant factor. The book about the drama of personal movement through a sleepy nation and confused time turned into a package of spectacular memes.

Bravely mixing a sparkling design with a featureless content, the applied mythology was a definitive trend of 2018. Lovely rhyming are not only corrected Alexievich with corrected Gorvat, but also the new films from the opposing poles of quality. The glazed gummy film “No Entry into Personal Space” by Alexandra Butor molds an image of a new generation of Belarusians from hackneyed clichés of the 1980s, a cardboardy plot and run-of-the-mill (supposedly relevant) characters: she is a hillbilly and he is an IT specialist.

A strange twin of this collective-farm sentimentalism is the gruesome quasi-document “Central”6 from the actors of the Free Theater. Young alternative culture adepts Dasha Andreyanova and Kolya Kuprich pieced a group portrait of sloshed losers and mopey freaks from the footage made in the cafeteria of the central supermarket of Minsk with a would-be generalized social diagnosis, which resulted in the same gag strip, but on the dark side.

The performatization of the cultural pattern is also a cutoff of the critical contemplation mechanisms. It was announced in June that the experty.by musical, analytical and information portal was frozen. The project leaders chose not to waste resources on criticism, reviews and analytics and to focus on promoting domestic artists (primarily in Europe). The actual expertise was reduced in favor of pragmatic pop management, which is a pretty understandable marketing choice. Kind of. In fact, they dropped their commitment to quality and growth targets and disbanded the pool of respected critics.

Blockades of charades

The year began and ended with experiments on a rectification of culture by the powers that be. In all cases, it was about the conflict between the state’s vision of cultural priorities and non-format creative practices. It should be noted that in 2018, problematic episodes that involved Belarusian artists went beyond the borders of Belarus.

In January, the Polish authorities detained an international group that organized a scandalous performance in the Auschwitz death camp. The project included full nudity, knives, shackles and a goat killed right there. The cumulative message “to the city and the world” was poorly readable, and was perceived as a provocative action in a historical location. The organizers – a couple of Belarusian students of Polish universities – tried to explain the high symbolism of the performance, but were still found guilty and convicted.

In the same winter, a series of photos of young Minsk residents, which reflected their complex views on the existing system, taken by Maxim Sarychau was removed7 from the Belarusian photo show “The Voice of Generation L” in China at the request of the local Chinese leadership.

The Minsk city administration prohibited performances of such popular artists as South African Die Antwoort and Russian Ic3Peak, inarticulately explaining that their “artistic level was too low” (the same was once said about gothic Rammstein, Zmicier Vajciuskevic, rapper Face, chanson Bydlocycle and ethno-punk Dzieciuki).

In 2018, in Minsk alone, the authorities prohibited more than a dozen concerts for no apparent reason. The repressive practices of Belarusian enforcers often copy (notoriously duplicate) the Russian restricted list, as happened to Ic3Peak this year and Sergei Zhadan a year before. Promoters started talking about actual cultural censorship.8

The scandal over the selection of Belarusian nominees for the Listapad Film Festival was an additional argument in favor of the statements about censorship. This year, a radical redistribution of powers took place at the preparatory stage: instead of the Listapad directorate, which was only given an advisory vote, the final decision on Belarusian contestants was made by a special commission of the Ministry of Culture. As a result, a number of prominent authors (including last year’s winners Yulia Shatun, Nikita Lavretsky and Andrei Kutyla) were not put on the list.

In response, film director Vlada Senkova announced her personal boycott of the festival. She was seconded by Eva-Katerina Makhova and Denis Putikov, who withdrew their “Wintering” documentary and Kirill Galitsky and Svetlana Kozlovskaya, directors of the film “Beach/Forest/Vestibule.” Their act remained low-profile, as the disunited and tamed filmmakers community just bad-mouthed off stage and traditionally chose private arrangements with the regime over a common struggle. There was a thematic “solidarity screening” of the films banned from Listapad in the Czech Republic instead.9

The schemes of editing of the cultural environment remained virtually unchanged. Minor troubles like the destruction of street graffiti (the disturbing “Nameless Man” on Voronyanskogo St., the mural on the bridge over Svisloch and the “KGBird” on Kozlova St. in Minsk alone) look ordinary and familiar, like the bulldozers that bit off a piece of the old-time residential area in the Tractor Plant township without a plausible reason, leaving the emptiness of semantic blank spaces.

Third wave: past the war of cultures

The growing information cluttering of the cultural environment, which we wrote about in the previous years, naturally leads to a general decline in the fineness and acuteness of cultural texts. Culture of the “third wave” lives a strange life of a market product in the absence of a real market, ideological confrontation, creative movement or conceptual transformations.

The main text of the year – Dogs of Europe by Algerd Bakharevich – is a multi-layered monumental construct that essentially completes the author’s years-long war with retrograde Belarusian literature, pathetic national romanticism, the dead cultural Euro-style and his personal demons. It is a declaration of independence from the inertial cultural context, which is impossible to forget.

The Dogs of Europe is a powerful message to those who will read it to the end without missing a single storyline, and will not be scared off by the “Balbuta”, the language invented by Bakharevich, a personal version of the Belarusian identity from a trusted supplier. After such a strong move, the following memoir notes about “my 1990s” inevitably lose like a box from a burnt firework. After those fireworks.

The 1990s – the dawn of independence and, concurrently, the fall of short freedom – were a strong trend of the year. The most high-profile locally-produced film “Crystal” by American-Belarusian Darya Zhuk is an international co-production about a young adventuress who dreams of getting out of the post-perestroika Minsk to the faraway Chicago. It is a gruesome melodrama with a flat plot, aggressive marketing and vigorous information support. The film collected in one package the entire set of cultural clichés of the early 1990s and became a premise from the past, a verbatim quotation of the outdated pop catalog devoid of amplificatory meaning and depth.

“Crystal” was convenient for everyone. The new generation was given a funny picture (sort of) of the past (sort of); filmmakers started thinking about collaboration advantages; fashionable media sang “yes, we can”, and culture executives provided cautious support and restrained input, and considerately took out the disturbing episode with the Chernobyl Shliakh procession from the theatrical cut.

There was a scandal there as well. The nomination of “Crystal” from Belarus for the U.S. Academy Award caused a wave of accusations of unfair game: it was found out that Valery Dmitrichenko, the film producer on the Belarusian side, was a member of the hastily formed national Oscars committee.10

Tattooed rock hero Sergei Mikhalok also made a step into the past. Having played enough with revolts and barricades, the former ideologist of partisan rock successfully blended into his native showbiz. Following the resuscitation of enthusiastic garage pop into the Lyapis-98 tour project, Mikhalok launched the Drezden solo project, a sentimental voyage to the dusty world of the 1980s and an attempt to approach a new segment of the global hypermarket. No more Belarusian or Ukrainian songs, but style memoirs instead. Mikhalok’s usual technique – a mix of self-sufficient lines in the format of retro travel – turns into a catalog of hobbies from the past on the list of dead signals of the hopelessly lost era.

The overall impression of the inertial course is solidified by other noticeable musical events of the year. The new release by a group of musical eccentrics RSP (formerly known as “The Boy’s Heart Broken”) reproduces the unoriginal heartaches-in-the-neighborhood style. The tree main components are the actorish singing (the leaders of the group are actors of the Free Theater), orphan’s weeps and disco of the 90’s.

Nizkiz (Mogilev) topped the chart of Tuzin.fm with stadium-scale energetics, catching melodies, the gift to excite the audience in no time, and hundred-percent predictability, the exact reflection of Belarusian victorious stability. This is the way to always stay relevant, by just pressing the replay button.

Conclusion

The dynamics of the cultural situation in 2018 generally corresponds to the trends we indicated in the previous reviews. The general ‘thaw policy’11 in culture promised by a number of optimistic observers last year failed to materialize. One-time presentations of decorative nationalism by no means affected education policy, the composition and content of media, the touring business and, certainly, the propaganda rhetoric. Of the two modes – permissive and prohibitive – a third, inertial one was chosen, the format of administrative self-defense and survival.

The lack of qualitative growth drivers in culture in combination with the general inertial-protective cultural policy of the state and the obvious deficit of fresh ideas inevitably stimulate the reprocessing of the archives. National culture actively lives back, mastering the crucial, yet distant and therefore comfortable past. Unlike the grotesque and touristy “Bulbashism” of the mid-2000s (the first stage of the light version of Belarusization), the current ‘embroidery’ of the national identity is convenient as a universal matrix of any pop versions of the localism, since it allows any interpretation of history from rebellious to loyal and patriotic, making them equally decorative and harmless.

The state of the semantic catatonia, in which the embroidery business turns out to be the most active player, remains unchanged due to the lack of internal resources for a transformation of the cultural landscape. The package of ideas and proposals remains equally zero among all players in this field, which automatically means a continued outflow of most striking creative initiatives (and the most exacting consumers) to the neighboring markets.