Ada Mukhina

I lay in my bed in London in 2018 and felt fear. A fear of the future that was about to come. A scholarship that paid for my second MA in one of London’s most prestigious theatre schools and my living costs in one of the most expensive cities in the world was going to run out in six months. And then what? How would I pay my bills? Where would I live? What would I do? 

How could I, as an artist, make my life more stable and avoid situations where I need to work on a current project and worry about the next one simultaneously? Where could I, as a female artist, find support to sustain myself, my family and a child, if I want one, and to continue making theatre? Where could I as a female artist from Russia find a space to present my work, where my critical thoughts about social issues were of value? 

As a ‘successful’ theatre artist who has received a lot of scholarships, fellowships and artist residencies, I can confirm that nothing makes your life easier and more predictable than knowing that you are about to start one. However, nothing makes you feel more anxious, worried and depressed than the end of something. My first fellowship gave me an opportunity to conduct artistic research in Germany. It gave me a semblance of stability for one year and a quality of life that I had never experienced earlier. Nevertheless, I started to have panic attacks at the end of the fellowship. It was the first time I felt my own precarity, because of the violent contrast between my ‘normal’ life as an artist from Russia who comes from a background of poverty, and the life of a lucky ‘artist-in-residence’. I believe that the system of artist residencies, scholarships and fellowships for artists is similar to fixed-term work contracts. It gives opportunities to just a few who can sell themselves better at the capitalism competition. Later, the system takes these opportunities away. Can the problem of artistic precarity be resolved at a systemic level? 

Having said that, I need to mention another concept that is crucial to an understanding of precarity in the artistic community. Risk-taking is something that is expected from artists, in being considered an essential part of art-making. However, it seems to me that the nature of risk as well as the understanding of risk varies from country to country. This difference became more obvious to me during my studies in the UK. As a theatre-maker who came to London from St. Petersburg, Russia, I realised very quickly that my British colleagues and I spoke different languages. However, this was not a linguistic issue per se, but a difference in context and references that came up in the use of certain words.

I had particularly strong feelings of frustration and a sense of misunderstanding when I encountered words like ‘risk’, ‘risk-taking’ and ‘creative risks’. As Elanor Stannage describes it, “despite brief references to risk or risk-taking as a process inherent to creativity, the concept itself is rarely explored”, often presented as a ‘self-explanatory’ term (Stannage 113). It took me a while to visualise the source of my mental and emotional discomfort. I drew these word clouds below to illustrate my findings about the understanding of risk in different countries, for instance, UK and Russia. 

I invited other artists who consciously worked with risk in different ways to join this research. The main exploration of risk in art with the audience took place in Camden People’s Theatre during my telematic performance RiskLab that was premiered in October 2018 in London. 

Abhishek Thapar, a theatre-maker and artist from India currently based in Amsterdam, and Anis Hamdoun, a director and writer from Syria, now in Berlin, joined me on Skype, each on different performance days. With both of them, I discussed the political risks in our home countries, what could and could not be said here and there. For example, with Abhishek, we developed a part of the performance where the audience had to choose what scene should be performed next: “The one that I could never perform in Russia” or “The one that I could have trouble with in the UK”. It was pure speculation, of course, because there were no scenes actually written or rehearsed. However, this provocation allowed me to ask the audience to explain their choices, and to ask themselves why they expect artists from another country to take risks for them.

Right after the premiere, I headed back to Russia. What is it that I would not be able to perform? What is it that I would be not able to talk about? Would I find collaborators who would be brave enough to uncover something that is hidden? Is my critical voice needed here in Russia? Keeping these questions in mind, I came to Moscow, to the Black Box Residency of the Meyerhold Theatre Centre. 

On the last day, I met my future collaborators for lunch, to talk about possible ideas for a joint project. Somehow, our conversation drifted towards money troubles; to talk about this in the Russian arts industry is considered to be in bad taste. Put up a bold front! No matter how big your money difficulty is. No matter how unfair the work conditions in some cultural institution are. Don’t wash your dirty linen in public. There are more important topics to talk about, because art is above money issues, labour, or the poverty of its own workers, who are lucky enough to be serving in this ivory temple. This is the status quo.

Somehow, a small talk about precariousness with my colleagues had a therapeutic effect on me. I am not the only artist who has sleepless nights worrying about her future. I am not the only female artist who potentially wants to have a baby and does not know how she will sustain herself and her family (given that the maternity pay for workers with no permanent job in Russia is 3500 RUB/ $50 per month, as our invited performer would state later). I am not the only female artist from Russia who is ready to risk, to raise a voice and to take discussions from friends-only Facebook chats to the public. This is how the title of our future performance Caries of Capitalism was born. At this lunch break in autumn 2018, we realised the healing and community-building effects of an open conversation about precarity, money and labour, and its potential threat to capitalistic competition in the theatre industry.

As a director who often initiates documentary theatre projects, I was interested to uncover in our performance facts that remain concealed in the theatre industry. “What are the benefits of working on a project for free at an unpaid residency without accommodation, if you are not making this situation the topic of your artistic research?”, I thought, packing my suitcase and preparing to spend a week in Moscow for the second time, when our project proposal was approved. It seemed that a collaborative spirit made us brave enough to neglect the risks of presenting a critique at the competition in front of our actual bosses - the artistic board of the Meyerhold Theatre Centre. What could we as freelance artists risk? The ability to work with these people again? Or might it make us ‘difficult’ to work within the eyes of other institutions as well?

Numbers interested me most whilst we were preparing our work-in-progress presentation. How many hours did we work to make it this far in the competition? How much money could we have made if we worked for the same amount of time at other jobs? How much money did the artistic director of the Meyerhold Centre make during this time? What is the budget of the residency? What are the chances of getting through this competition and covering the costs of the unpaid work by winning the first prize and receiving a production budget? In the beginning, when we started to ask these questions even of each other, it felt uncomfortable, rude, risky. However, this feeling changed slowly to relief, and even excitement— about challenging the jury at the public presentation. We thought that if we lost, we could always say the reason was that the artistic board was afraid to accept the criticism and to consider the necessity of the changes in their residency program. It was a small artistic riot, a refusal to create a work. Instead, we wanted to talk about the conditions of its creation.

We did not lose. Instead, we got the second prize. That meant that we could not say anymore that the institution was afraid of our criticism. Yet we couldn’t begin to devise the work right away. The Meyerhold Centre applied for an external grant from the Ministry of Culture that we needed to wait for. This period of time made us cool down and reflect on the situation. What was our relation to the institution, money, and power, once we got the funding? Did the institution hire us to criticise it? How would we hire other people to our team? Would we organise another competition, similar to the one that we just went through? How would we distribute time and money, now that we were the bosses? 

This thought process led us to one of the key scenes of the performance that we called ‘The Disclosure’. Partly it was also inspired by the book “Training for Exploitation?” by the Precarious Workers Brigade collective, and particularly the “Bust Your Boss” exercise, that Daria Iuriichuk came across during her research. Its aim is “to challenge the culture of silence around wages and labour, especially in the arts” by practising how to ask ‘uncomfortable’ questions among your peers and by creating collective solidarity. We decided to practice the art of ‘busting your boss’ directly inside our piece in front of the audience. Our performers (precarious theatre workers) were invited to continue the practice we started with the artistic board of the Meyerhold Theatre Centre by asking us sharp questions of their choice about our production process. How much money did the creative team get? Can they see the budget? Why should the performers devise texts they speak by themselves, and since they did so, why weren’t they listed as co-creators of the piece? 

It is important to continue practising asking ‘uncomfortable’ questions publicly— especially if you are a precarious artist, a female precarious artist, a Russian female precarious artist. It might change the culture of silence in the national industry, and it might change the dynamics between Western art institutions and East European artists. However, it is perhaps even more important to continue practising answers to those questions when you become ‘the boss’. It is hard. We learned from our own experience.

WORKS CITED

Preston, Sheila, and Michael Balfour. “Applied practice: Evidence and impact in theatre, music and art.” Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017.

Brigade, Precarious Workers, and S. Federici. "Training for exploitation? Politicising employability and reclaiming education." Journal of Aesthetics and Protest (2017).

Ada Mukhina is a nomadic artist and theatre director from St.Petersburg (Russia), who works internationally. Her documentary, socially engaged and participatory theatre work was presented at theatres and festivals in the UK, the Netherlands, South Africa, the USA, Germany, and Russia.