ong before the pandemic, working over video calls was completely normal for husband-and-wife team Natalia Koliada and Nikolai Khalezin. The founders of Belarus Free Theatre, who arrive in Australia soon to put on the productionat Adelaide festival, have worked under extreme conditions since the company’s birth in 2005.
A meeting point would be arranged and the audience would proceed to the secret venue – a private apartment, a vacant warehouses, sometimes a forest – that would be constantly changed to elude authorities. “Now we are all in different locations, but nobody can go back to Belarus,” Koliada says from London. “We all face jail. Today there are more artists in jail in Belarus than journalists and human rights defenders.”Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardianalmost 600 writers, artists and cultural workers alone were targeted by armed forces in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election that reasserted Lukashenko’s dictatorship.