Radical, activist, spiritual, feminist, challenging state and church, standing up to the powers that be, railing against the patriarchal status quo, a beacon of inspiration and sign of bravery for those all over the world who want change but perhaps feel too timid to try to make it – that’s Pussy Riot.
Feminist protest punk rock group Pussy Riot are in residence at Greenbelt!
There can be few braver and more notorious arts-activist collectives at work in the world today. And our hope, in having Pussy Riot in residence with us at Greenbelt 2018, is that our imaginations will be inspired and provoked to action, so that we ask: what can we do to effect change and freedom in our lives and in the situations where we find ourselves?
Riot Days – the musical, theatrical interpretation of core member Maria Alyokhina’s book (written about Pussy Riot’s genesis, trial and incarceration) – will form the centrepiece of the group’s time at the festival. In Riot Days, Maria has written a book and devised a show (together with Pussy Riot) that not only tells a compelling story of injustice, inciting our response, but that is also a work of art in its own right. Rather than countering the prose, power and patriarchy of Putin’s Russia with more prose and proposition, Pussy Riot create surprise, events, happenings, space for life – and sometimes even joy – in the face of seemingly desperate circumstances.
Riot Days and Pussy Riot are an inescapable reminder that when any of us remain silent in the face of injustice, we are complicit with it. And that when any of us gives so much as an inch, the powerful will take a mile. In these days of swirling conspiracies and inter-connectedness, where a few egomaniacal men seem to sit atop the world’s agenda – propped on all sides by webs of political, commercial, tech and corporate bolstering – we need to hold true to the rights, dignity and worth of all human beings. That’s what Pussy Riot demand of their own system – and of us all.