Episode 92: Art is a Weapon with Playwright Sasha Denisova
Channel: RADICALIZED: Truth Survives Podcast
Date: 2024-04-09

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Sasha Denisova is a playwright, a director, a writer, and a Ukrainian. Sasha was born in Kyiv. She graduated from the Philology Department of Kyiv Taras Shevchenko University. Sasha subsequently studied theater and worked at various theatre companies in Russia. While residing in Russia she studied documentary theater at the Theater Doc company in Moscow, trained at Royal Court in London and graduated from the School of a Theater Leader, a program run by the Moscow Art Theatre School. She served as a deputy artistic director at the Mayakovsky Theater and as the chief dramaturg at the Meyerhold Center in Moscow, and she also taught documentary theater and screenwriting at the Moscow School of New Cinema.

Sasha’s play Light My Fire was awarded Russia’s highest theatre prize, The Golden Mask, in 2012. As a playwright and director Sasha has produced more than 25 performances at Moscow stages, including The Dusty Day, Alice and the State, Sforza, Hotel California, Sea Pines, Batman vs. Brezhnev, and Hermione. Sasha makes sharply social, political theater in which documentary material merges with magical and fantastical.

She fled Moscow for Poland immediately after the outbreak of full-scale war in Ukraine. At the same time, all of Sasha’s productions in Russia were shut down. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion she has written and staged 4 plays, all of them about the war: Six Ribs of Anger, about the fate of Ukrainian refugees in Europe (first presented at Kommuna Warszawa in Poland); My Mom and the Full-Scale Invasion (first staged reading: Barcelona, CCCV Museum of Contemporary Art with the support from the Artists at Risk initiative); The Hague, an account of a tribunal against Putin and his gang that takes place in the imagination of a Ukrainian girl from Mariupol, which Sasha also directed at the Polish Theater in Poznan (February 2023) and at the Arlekin Players Theater in Boston (June 2023); and Bakhmut, a story of two women who mourn the same man, an intellectual whom they had loved and who gave his life for his country.

Special thanks to our translator Marina!