1 - In Their Own Words: Andrei Kureichik’s Documentary Impulse

Summary

This text is a collective confession of a nation that has been beaten, raped, and insulted. These are the voices of the victims of violence, people who have suffered terribly. The text comprises public interviews and letters from political prisoners and Belarusians who have suffered from repression.[…] Their stories form a document. A document of historical significance.

Kureichik, Voices of the New Belarus, 2021

As events were still unfolding in Belarus, playwright Andrei Kureichik turned to documentary theatre following the 2020 fraudulent election and vicious crackdown against protestors in an effort to share the story and compel an international community to press for action against Aliaksandr Lukashenka's regime. As a member of the Coordination Council created by Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya to publicly challenge the election results and hold Lukashenka's government accountable for unlawful actions, Kureichik left Belarus when he was called before an investigative committee shortly after the election. On August 20, 2020, according to the BBC, the Prosecutor General of Belarus opened a criminal case against the Coordination Council, a representative body made up of a core group of 110 Belarusian leaders in a range of disciplines organized by Tsikhanouskaya and her team, for its efforts to “seize power” and harm national security. Kureichik was advised to leave immediately or face indefinite imprisonment.3 Despite what he felt were absurd allegations, he knew there was no rule of law in Belarus and left his home on August 21, 2020.

In exile, still in shock from the severity of Lukashenka's violence toward the opposition, Kureichik immediately went to work using the only tools at his disposal—his playwriting skills and network of theatre workers. In September 2020, he wrote the play Insulted. Belarus., which directly represents the clash between Lukashenka's regime and the pro-democracy resistance in 2020, using real names and verbatim texts along with fictional, metaphorical material that captures the feelings, as he experienced it, of the August events. The following year, Kureichik wrote the play Voices of the New Belarus, an entirely verbatim piece based on the real texts of real political prisoners in Belarus.