Even off the stage, Marija “Mascha” Wladmirovna Alyokhina’s life seems like a production. Every movement is action, Instagrammable. She snuck out of house arrest in her friend’s Moscow apartment in the costume of a food courier, something no theater director could have dreamed up more symbolically: in the garish green uniform of western trash consumption culture, she outwitted the apparatchik.
Of course, there are doubts about the spectacular escape that became known last week. How is it supposed to work that Alyokhina, since the “punk prayer” on the altar of Christ the Redeemer Church in 2012 as the world’s most famous face behind the balaclavas of the feminist Pussy Riot kickers of Putin, has been one of the number one public enemies in Russia fooled her shadowers by such a clumsy trick? She could hardly believe it herself, spoke of “magic” when she landed safely in Lithuania via Belarus New York Times gave an interview. She tried to explain the amazing failure of the security apparatus as follows: “From here he looks like a big demon, but the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.”
One does not get the impression of the decentrally organized collective Pussy Riot, which is also controlled via chat groups. “Everything is damn well prepared,” says Sebastian Reier-Roelly, dramaturge responsible for pop at the Kammerspiele.
The appearance of the Moscow punk activists in the Munich theater has been arranged for a long time and should have taken place earlier than on Tuesday, May 17th. It had to be postponed several times because of Corona, but not because Alyokhina has been arrested six times since last summer. It was always the wish that the most prominent fighter of the “Pussyversum” lead the western European tour, says Reier-Roelly, “but they would have done it without her”. So he’s passionate about everything. As a journalist at the Roskilde Festival in 2014, he just got to know “Mascha” as easy-going, open and curious, “always on the air, but also receiving”, intent on forging alliances in the West.
“An evening with an uncertain outcome”
So he was happy at the end of March when she posted a photo of her severed radio handcuffs and the message “Fuck jail, no war!” tweeted. She was probably free again, as far as that goes in an unjust system. But in the war of aggression against Ukraine, the Kremlin once again intensified its crackdown on loud critics. Most of the Pussy Riot comrades-in-arms left the country in secret ways, and when Alyokhina was threatened with being sent back to a prison camp, she too fled. The circumstances reminded her of a spy film. Is the CIA behind Pussy Riot, as some say?
Such conspiracy fantasies go too far for Sebastian Reier-Roelly, he considers Pussy Riot “to be completely real. They are extremely resourceful people who should not be underestimated, a solid movement with considerable financial opportunities”. You have many helpers in the West, from the FDP-affiliated Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom, which organized the tour (in favor of Ukrainian refugee children), to the Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson, who procured the entry travel documents.
Just in time for the start of the 19 concerts – and so the escape seems like a prelude to the tour. But it’s not a game, says the dramaturge. “We can’t imagine the kind of repression the artists are working under, the risks they’re taking.” Who would rabble about with anti-Putin slogans just to end up in jail again and again? The husband of a Pussy Riot member probably only just survived a poisoning attack; co-founder Nadezhda Tolokonnikova is said to be living in an unknown location in the USA due to rumors of murder.
Who knows who else is trolling around in the audience
Isn’t that too real for a theatre, too dangerous for the audience? After a 180-minute “crossover from concert, rally” (experience has shown that an intended impertinence, as in 2018 at the “Riot Days Theater” in the Muffathalle), they should still discuss with the band in the hall, and who knows who is still trolling around in the audience . There will be no more security, says Reier-Roelly, the band expressly requested that. “I think very highly of the organization, if they don’t see any danger, we’ll go with them.”
But does the Kammerspiele also take on the political message of Pussy Riot with the engagement? In 2014 Alyokhina presented her documentary “Pussy vs Putin” at the Dok-Fest in Munich. She lamented Putin’s maliciousness (and the friendship between the conductor Valery Gergiev and the ruler), the patriarchy and prison conditions in Russia, the occupation of Crimea, the West’s lax sanctions and the sale of Munich apartments to rich Russians – the issues are growing as topical as before, but even more explosive.
“Of course we are concerned with the question of how we as a theater can support civil society disobedience in Russia,” said director Barbara Mundel when announcing the performance. And Reier-Roelly explains that they have “a sisterhood with Kyiv” and that they are “among those who are being attacked”: “And if we include that in the program, it’s clear that we want to support this force. What we can do is to provide a platform for exchange and to enable human encounters.” What then happens in the hall is left in the hands of the artists. “An evening with an uncertain outcome,” says the dramaturge, “that’s also important.”