***Warning: this post discusses sexual assault, which may be triggering for some readers.***
At what point does art cross the fine line from trailblazing experimentation to troubling uncomfort? This was the question I asked myself after going to a show last night at the contemporary theater here in Almaty, Artishock. The show was called “It’s All Weinstein’s Fault,” and followed the story of 15-year-old Alina (Laura Tursunkanova) who, after feeling slighted in class by her teacher, Alexy Nikolaevich (Evgeny Ignatov), decided with her friends to post a video online proclaiming that he had sexually assaulted her.
This was, of course, not true, but it nevertheless had devastating consequences. Alexy was publicly ostracized, and at one point was even cornered on his way home from the grocery store and beaten by the girls’ friends. After this event, he recounted how his son said that everyone at school was calling his dad a pedophile. At this point in the show, the woman in front of me shook her head, obviously disgusted by the lie the teenage girl had told.
To be fair, the girl’s character was arguably created to be unsympathetic. Sporting white converse, baggy sweatshirts, and cut-off denim shorts, she represented a teenager who frequently found herself in trouble. Her group of friends often drank beer, danced, and smoked (real cigarettes!) on the stage, and at one point Alina even flashed herself for a video that her friend was taking of her.
Don’t lose sympathy for her just yet, though- in one scene, the girl’s complicated relationship with her mother was revealed, fleshing out her character and giving more context to her actions. In the scene, the teenager was in a shopping cart, being rocked back and forth by her mother as if in a stroller. Indeed, the mother kept shushing the girl and acting as if she were a baby, while the teenager screamed at her mother. She yelled that she hated her father, who was out of the picture, and all the men her mother dated after, who beat her mother. With this sort of childhood and relationship with her parents, then, it makes sense that Alina would try to process her emotions in unhealthy ways.
For this reason, condemning the girl because of her decision to falsely accuse her teacher of sexual assault wasn’t so clear-cut. Maybe she was merely a product of her upbringing, but does that give her the right to ruin a man’s life? How much sympathy should be allocated to the girl, and how much should be allocated to the teacher?
These seemed to be the types of questions that the play’s author, Svetlana Petriychuk, wanted the audience to think about. However, later in the show the teacher delivered a shocking soliloquy, which was as entertaining as it was confusing, and his actions immediately made me lose sympathy for the character. The story’s twist was completely unexpected and raised an entirely new set of questions: Was Alina right to lie? Who was the real victim in the story, and does that even matter?
The story itself was brilliant in provoking these questions, and the actors, although much older than fifteen, did an incredible job of depicting teenagers who were in the process of pushing life’s limits. The friends’ shenanigans were depicted in dark blue light, with loud club music playing in the room. Smoke filled the room, and at times the actors even passionately made out with one another. These elements made me think that I was in an underground club in Berlin rather than an experimental theater in Almaty.
Despite the incredible story and performance, though, I was appalled at the depiction of a young girl purposefully lying about her teacher committing sexual assault. Sure, Petriychuk aims at shocking her audience (she’s currently being detained in Russia on charges of justifying terrorism in another one of her plays amidst a crackdown on dissent), but since women are rarely believed about their experiences with sexual assault, I was horrified to see that narrative being pushed in any capacity. To me, nothing else about the story really mattered– what mattered was that this story, even if just a little bit, supported the idea that some women are lying about their experiences with sexual assault.
As my host sister and I boarded the bus to head back home, she told me to wait to talk about the show until we were off the bus, saying “We don’t talk about those things in public.” There has been a grassroots movement to address the issue of sexual abuse in Kazakhstan, notably using the hashtag #NeMolchiKZ (“don’t stay quiet”), but my host sister began to tell me on our walk back from the bus stop about how no one really talks about sexual assault in Kazakhstan. Many victims face a culture of shame and unbelievability, and very few choose to go to the police.
Maybe the show’s director, Aiganym Ramadan, was trying to bring attention to the small grassroots movement through the show– after all, maybe some attention is better than nothing at all, and there are certainly merits in exploring unconventional topics. However, there are many contemporary feminist plays that address the issue in a way that supports survivors (albeit few in Russian). In any case, I’m not convinced that depicting a false sexual assault allegation helps the movement to believe sexual assault survivors. I was deeply bothered by the fact that this play not only supported the narrative that survivors of sexual assault might be lying, but also by the fact that in doing so, the performance didn’t support survivors that were right there in the audience.
This play was uncomfortable for me at the very least, and at most, it could be truly triggering. Therefore, the real question I found myself asking after the performance was whether pushing a narrative that discourages women from coming forward about their experiences with sexual assault is worth the shock factor of an acting performance, or if there was a line that was crossed.
I don’t know. Is that art?
