Josephine Burton on Dash Arts' Revolution17

Dash’s Revolution17 is all kicking off this month.

It’s taken a few years to get going.

Although that’s pretty standard practice at Dash Arts – we tend to immerse ourselves in a world: reading, watching, travelling, listening, chatting, dreaming and workshopping ideas with artists for months before we end up presenting our work. I remember chatting years ago to RunRiot about our plans and a small season of gigs with artists from the Post Soviet Space. Finally in 2017, this amazing journey is drawing to a close, with some explosive gigs, events, conversations and new productions in the centennial year of the Russian Revolution.

Our journey began in the autumn of 2012, when my co artistic director Tim Supple and I set off for Moscow and St Petersburg. Our aim was to create a series of work that explored how it was to live in the Soviet Union and how it is to live in its shadows. Since this preliminary trip, we have returned repeatedly to the region to run workshops, meet artists, and see work. Drawing directly from our experiences, over the last almost five years we have presented 50 Dash Cafes (http://www.dasharts.org.uk/events/dashcafes.html) at Rich Mix which explore the culture and history of the 12 former Soviet Republics (we made a decision early on not to include the Baltic countries in this season), 16 gigs with international visiting artists from the region and 10 iterations of our pop-up Russian country house-come-performance space, the Dacha, across the UK. We reckon that during this time, we’ve presented more than 500 artists, writers, thinkers and academics and reached well over 30,000 people….

It’s been quite an adventure.

My strongest memories include:

- Presenting the wonderful Dakhabrakha with their traditional Ukrainian folk songs and mesmerising beats at Rich Mix on the eve of the Brexit Referendum when we still believed that the UK continued to want to welcome the world.

- Crossing a still-barricaded Maidan in Kyiv, weeks after the official protests had ended, with my young tour guide, a cultural enthusiast, who pointed out in one breath, the Music Conservatoire and the place behind the ferris wheel where only a few weeks earlier she had crouched and crushed the white leads out of television sets to make Molotov cocktails.

- Spending a week’s residency with musicians in front of the picturebook background of snow-topped Mount Kazbegi and the Caucasus Mountains, in Georgia.

- Attending court in Moscow to watch Pussy Riot appeal their guilty verdict and witnessing their circus-like entourage of paparazzi, red rose-carrying supporters, Orthodox Babushkas and black leather, crucifix wielding men.

- A Kazakh radio station appearance with an ensemble of musicians strumming furiously on their electronic versions of the Kazakh folk instrument the Dombra

- A five-hour mesmerising Macbeth in Russian in Moscow. Just one show amongst some truly excellent theatre, music and art by artists based in the region and its diaspora that I’ve had the privilege to see.

When we started the project, Tim and I were greeted with some confusion: “The Soviet Union ended 25 years ago, we’ve moved on, so why do you continue to dredge up our past?”. We certainly have met and worked with artists for whom the Soviet Union is ancient history and have visited places such as Baku where there is very little visible mark of its impact left on the landscape. However, the Soviet past does continue to feel very present in the new theatre and art which we have continued to encounter on our travels, and in the pervasive nostalgia for Soviet culture. And certainly in the news. At our next Dash Café on April 26th at Rich Mix, we’ll launch Peter Conradi’s book Who Lost Russia: How the World Entered a New Cold War, and as we read this week of Spies, the importance of NATO and freezing relations between the White House and Kremlin, it is very easy to imagine that the clock has turned back 50 years.

We’re looking backwards and forwards in many of our shows and events. Highlights of the next few weeks include four gigs at Rich Mix with some amazing musicians from Ukraine (the wonderful Mariana Sadovska who picks up the old stongs and stories of Ukraine and creates contemporary mesmerising songs and Abraham Brody Live), Russia (Dash Gig: Oligarkh with their dark audio visual mash-ups of orthodox chants, soviet tv footage and electronica), Azerbaijan via Berlin (Dash Gig: The Disorientalists playfully telling the story of the mysterious writer of their great Caucasian lovestory Ali and Nino) Armenia and Turkey (Dash Gig: Vardan Hovanissian and Emre Guletkincreated 100 years on for the Armenian Genocide) at Rich Mix London, all of whom weave folk traditions and stories into their contemporary sounds.

Over at The British Library, we’ll premiere the Renegade Orchestra at Late at the Library: Sounds of the Revolution. The seed for the Renegade Orchestra was planted back in 2012 at the Tchaikovksy Conservatoire in Moscow during my first visit when I heard stories of classically-trained musicians. Over the last five years, I have gradually gathered an ensemble of exceptional musicians, trained in the conservatoires of the Former Soviet Union from Uzbekistan, to Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova and Russia, and now working outside these worlds in rock, jazz, folk and contemporary classical music. Working closely with Moscow based composer Alexander Manotskov, Kyiv-based playwright Natalia Vorozhbit and Almaty-based director Galina Pyanova, we have created a piece of music theatre that depicts their stories and musical / artistic journeys. Journey 1 will take place at the British Library on 5^th May with Gabriel Prokofiev’s Nonclassical and Kino Klassika.