The world premiere of the documentary opera Russia : Today took place on 30 September 2021 at Theatre Centre Vaba Lava in Narva, a city on the border of Estonia and Russia. The performance was a highlight of a 5-day artistic intervention entitled Narva: Tomorrow. This public programme brought together local and international participants in a series of discussions and creative workshops.
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The events or collective actions focused on three questions: what was Narva? what is Narva? what will Narva become? The reference to the name of the famous conceptual artist group from the Soviet underground is no coincidence. The programme explored participation as an artistic and social strategy for creating the now, and thus, for building the future. A similar kind of practice was also instrumental in the process of creating Russia : Today. Eugene Birman collected over 300 interviews about Russia that made the libretto of the piece.
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Birman, who was born in Daugavpils in 1987, on the Latvia-Russia-Belarus border, said that his motivation for the project relates to his desire to “genuinely engage with people who are too often spoken for, lumped together demographically, held to unnecessarily low expectations. The rhetoric since the fall of the Soviet Union thirty years ago hasn’t appreciably changed. But people have. They deserve to draw their own identities. We hope to stimulate this discussion in Narva through public events with the local community and young people interested in the arts.”
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The programme engaged with Narva’s local context and sought to create a safe space for sharing multiple perspectives, mutual understanding, finding inspiration and new meanings together.