A small theatre that does not act so small
In a basement in Yerevan, 30 years ago, a teenage director built a stage because the actors refused to perform in the cold. Today, Vahan Badalyan’s “Small Theatre” is one of the few places in Armenian culture ready to raise hard questions about disability, fear, and what Armenian art still will not say aloud.
September 11, 2026 -
Kushane՛ Chobanyan
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Issue 5 2026MagazineStories and ideas
Vahan Badalyan, left, sits with his mentee, Eduard Kizoghyan, a second-year acting student at the Yerevan State Theatre and Film Institute. Kizoghyan sees his own generation’s task as keeping pace not just with new theatrical techniques, but also with an entirely new way of thinking.
Photo: Gabor Dusa
Yerevan, 1996. A 17-year-old boy named Vahan Badalyan is negotiating with his parents to use the basement of their apartment building. He is already directing his own theatre company, but winter has come and the actors – mostly his relatives and friends – refuse to perform outdoors. Almost everyone around him thinks he is out of his mind; theatre is not a serious profession, but Badalyan refuses to listen.
A few months later, spectators are buying tickets to a 20-actor troupe performing in that basement, a company Badalyan calls “Oasis”. Then one evening, a well-known Armenian art critic named Henrik Igityan comes to see a production of Eugène Ionesco’s The Lesson. By the time the lights come up, Badalyan has an offer to join the Window Theatre. He will later rename it the Small Theatre – the auditorium seats 80 people, but the theatre has grown into one that does not act small at all. The Small Theatre in Yerevan is a repertoire company; a training studio for young directors; an inclusive dance company built with performers with and without disabilities; an art studio; and depending on which of its projects you happen to have seen, several entirely different institutions at once.
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Armenia, Art, inclusion, performance, Theatre
