How to Make Theater Out of Real Life / Rapid Response Theater With Sasha Denisova
Wednesday, February 14, 2024
About this Event
Lecture/workshop series with Sasha Denisova, award-winning Ukrainian playwright and director:
2/8, 4:30-5:30 (Higgins Hall 300 Auditorium),
2/9, 4:30-5:30 (Higgins Hall 310 Auditorium),
2/12, 4:30-5:30 (Higgins Hall 310 Auditorium)
Staged reading of the play The Gaaga (The Hague)
with BC students, faculty and staff and Boston area
actors: Wednesday, 2/14, 7:00PM (245 Beacon
Auditorium 107)
Auditions for the staged reading (open to all BC
students, faculty and staff):
Thursday, 2/8, 7:00PM (Gasson Hall 205)
Guest lecture (open to all BC students, faculty and
staff): Theater and politics since the beginning of
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine (Twentieth-
Century Russian Literature/Prof. Maxim D. Shrayer),
Tuesday, 2/13, 3:00-4:15, Lyons Hall 202
Sasha Denisova makes sharply political theater in which documentary material merges with the grotesque and the fantastic. Born and raised in Kyiv, Ukraine, Denisova had a very successful career as a director, dramaturge, and playwright in Moscow (winning Russia’s most prestigious award for theater, the Golden Mask), but fled Russia for Poland immediately after the onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion of her country in February 2022.
Her latest play about the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war, My Mama and the Full-Scale Invasion, based on online conversations between Denisova and her mother in wartime Kyiv, is currently on stage at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia and will be livestreamed on 2/9, 2/10 and 2/11 (https://wilmatheater.org/event/my-mama-and-the-
full-scale-invasion/)
During her residency at BC, Denisova will give a lecture series/workshop on her approach to documentary theater and will direct a staged reading of her critically acclaimed play The Gaaga (The Hague), written in 2022-2023, and staged by theaters in Poland, Bulgaria, France and the US (including the June 2023 Boston production). In the phantasmagoric tragifarce The Gaaga, a teenage Ukrainian girl living in a bomb shelter in Mariupol imagines a Nuremberg-style war crimes tribunal for Putin and his cronies. The staged reading will be performed by BC students and other members of the BC community as well as Boston-based professional actors.