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Andrei Kureichyk’s stubborn insistence on freedom

The story of Andrei Kureichyk is a good reflection of the story of Belarus itself. The playwright turned political activist, who has been in exile since 2020, believes that the idea of an independent and free Belarus cannot be abandoned. His most recent project, Voices of the New Belarus, serve as testimony to this belief.

Once or twice a week, throughout April and May 2023, the Belarusian playwright, filmmaker and political activist Andrei Kureichyk walked down several flights of creaky stairs into the dusty basement of a building in New Haven, Connecticut. The basement, belonging to Yale University’s School of Drama, had been converted a number of years earlier into a recording studio, and Kureichyk was joined by an audio engineer in training as well as a different voice actor each visit. Some were student or professional actors; some were intellectuals or professors. They had been recruited for Kureichyk’s project Voices of the New Belarus, a multimedia adaption of his play of the same title.

February 7, 2024 - Daniel Edison - Hot TopicsIssue 1-2 2024Magazine

Andrei Kureichik at the World Press Freedom Conference in 2020. Photo: Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken (CC) commons.wikimedia.org

In the play, as well as the art installation composed of voiceovers and video art depicting Belarusian protests, he had compiled testimonies of activism and repression from the 2020 Belarusian uprising into a real-life narrative examining the dreaming, suffering and perseverance of the Belarusian opposition to dictator Alyaksandr Lukashenka.

Some of these testimonies are household names among politically active Belarusians, including musician-turned-activist Maryia Kalesnikava, journalist Marina Zolotova and blogger Ihar Losik. They are all currently behind bars in Belarus. Others are ordinary Belarusians like Vitaly Marokko, who was beaten and shot by security forces in front of his son when he decided to protest against the election’s blatant falsification, and furniture maker Pyotr Kirik, who was thrown into a van and arrested while walking home in 2020. Among the professors who participated in the project, which premiered at the Oslo Freedom Forum in 2023, was historian Timothy Snyder, known internationally for his support of Ukraine since 2014. He voiced the testimony of Nobel peace laureate Ales Bialiatski, who is currently serving a ten-year prison sentence in Belarus.

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