Back in the USSR

Back in the USSR by Art & Shock exposes how the girls are formed into Soviet people through strict, one-sided socialization processes.

From the potty training in kindergarten a collective Lenin cult is cultivated. Later the emotional repertoire is expanded and the girls fall in love with Lenin and practice kissing on the revolutionary hero’s bust. Late in puberty this grows into an almost necrophiliac attraction and religious ardour. In the Soviet Union Lenon busts in plaster replace the forbidden Russian-Ortodox church’s icons. Back in the USSR presents a society in which identification with the state’s aims can be equaled with state-managed religious uniformity.

Art & Shock presents the societal models for molding its citizens within a dramaturgic logic not simply linear. The production challenges the government’s paranoid need for control and overview over the chaos of daily life. The company lets the trivial arenas such as kindergartens, class rooms, gyms and bathrooms be metaphors for something as large and symbol-heavy as the Soviet Union.

The flashbacks to the Soviet era awaken personal memories from the childhood in audience and actors alike. Like «Ostalgia» wave (Goodbye Lenin, Trabant, Sandmännchen/Sandman) in the former DDR, Back in the USSR contemporary point of view has a built-in nostalgic perspective in its flashbacks. When we meet the three girls as women in the post-Soviet turbo capitalist reality one can understand the longing with which they look back.

Art & Shock was the first independent theatre company in Kazakhstan when it was established in Almaty in 2002 by Galina Pyanova. 

Back in the USSR was presented through the Performing Arts Network of Norway.

Source: Autumn program 2008, Avant Garden.