Prospero: Artists in Conflict Zones - Creation, Resistance and Survival in Conflict Zones

At SIPAM 2026, artists from Ukraine and Georgia joined Milo Rau in a deeply personal discussion about theatre under war, occupation, censorship and political repression. Their conversation revealed art as a way of remaining visible, preserving memory and keeping communities alive.

What does it mean to continue creating when war is unfolding outside the rehearsal room, when colleagues are imprisoned, institutions are dismantled and cultural memory is destroyed piece by piece? Is art made under such conditions primarily resistance, testimony or survival? And what kind of solidarity can the international cultural sector offer beyond invitations, declarations and temporary visibility?

These questions shaped Prospero: Artists in Conflict Zones – Creation, Resistance, and Survival, a panel held on 24 June as part of the Sibiu International Performing Arts Market. Moderated by Romanian dramaturg and journalist Ionuț Sociu, the conversation brought together Data Tavadze, Artistic Director of the Royal District Theatre in Tbilisi; Koko Roinishvili, director and founder of Tbilisi City Theatre; Milo Rau, Artistic Director of the Wiener Festwochen, who joined online; Sandro Kalandadze, director and co-founder of Haraki Theatre Company; and Ukrainian actress, director and screenwriter Veronica Litkevich.

The discussion was introduced by Enorah Lepaih, Prospero Project Officer at Théâtre de Liège, who presented Prospero NEW as the first European platform dedicated to supporting emerging theatre artists and helping them move from national recognition towards a broader European and international presence.

For artists working in unstable environments, Lepaih argued, financial support is only the beginning. They also need time, spaces in which to create, opportunities to meet collaborators, international mobility and access to networks capable of carrying their work beyond national borders.

That distinction, between speaking on behalf of artists and creating the conditions in which they can speak for themselves, remained central throughout the conversation.

Sociu opened the panel from his own experience as a cultural journalist who had reported close to conflict zones. He recalled the questions that remained with him long after leaving those places: Who leaves? Who stays? Who returns? How much of a conflict remains alive inside people after the immediate danger has passed?

He then asked who has the right to tell the story of a conflict: the person living through it, the artist who left, the artist who remained, the next generation or the outsider who witnessed it.

For Milo Rau, no single perspective can claim absolute authority. “Every conflict has different levels and different realities,” he said. “There is a global level, a level of witnessing, a level of the people involved, a level of practice and resistance. There is a perspective of hope and a perspective describing how we lose hope. There is no clear hierarchy.”

Rau also challenged the apparent separation between those inside a conflict and those observing it from afar. An artist may not be physically present, he argued, but can still be implicated through political systems, economic structures or national interests.

Speaking about his long-term work in Congo, he pointed to the role played by international corporations and the mining industry. “I am responsible for what is happening there,” he said of the involvement of companies connected to his own country. In other situations, however, he acknowledged that support does not automatically grant an artist the right perspective from which to tell a story.

Data Tavadze similarly rejected the idea that testimony belongs exclusively to those at the centre of catastrophe. People in the midst of conflict may be unable to process what they are experiencing, let alone immediately transform it into art.

Reflecting on Georgia’s wars during the 1990s, Tavadze stressed the importance of international journalists who documented events when local artists and communities had neither the time nor the necessary resources to do so.

“We need all perspectives on a crisis,” he said. “We need the perspective from inside, but also the perspective from outside. When you are in the middle of resistance, it is very difficult to immediately begin reflecting on what is going on. Sometimes it takes time before you are able to talk about it.”

For Sandro Kalandadze, born in 1991, conflict has been a continuous background to life in Georgia. The collapse of the Soviet Union was followed by civil war, the loss of Abkhazia, the Russian occupation of Georgian territories and the 2008 war.

“I don’t remember a period when there was complete stability,” he said. “It was always either protests, riots, war or something else. You get used to it. And when you are so involved, it is sometimes difficult to have enough distance to see certain things. Outside perspectives are important because you can lose objectivity when you are emotionally involved.”

The difference between witnessing and belonging

Rau’s projects, including The Congo Tribunal and Orestes in Mosul, have often involved extensive fieldwork and long-term collaboration with communities affected by violence. Asked how this work differed from journalism, he spoke about two forms of objectivity.

A journalist, he suggested, must preserve a certain distance. An artist works through involvement. “If you do a project as an artist, you become friends, you lose distance and you become involved,” Rau said. “That is the whole interest of it. You form a group, and with this group you change your status and begin telling a story collectively. A journalist stays outside, watches, collects and perhaps judges. You would not do that in art.”

This involvement also requires time. Rau said it took years of returning to Central Africa before he began to understand the different actors, forces and responsibilities surrounding the conflicts he was investigating.

“In the lifetime of a journalist, you can touch many different regions. In the lifetime of an artist, you cannot,” he explained. “As an artist, you are much less free to choose your topics. The topics are given to you.”

The responsibility of the artist therefore lies in the relationships that remain after a production ends. Rau described how his work in Mosul exposed the practical barriers preventing young Iraqi artists from travelling and presenting theatre internationally. Visa restrictions and the absence of touring infrastructure made it almost impossible for many of them to accompany productions abroad.

The response was not another temporary project, but the development of a film school in Mosul, created in collaboration with local partners and UNESCO.

For him, international solidarity must eventually become concrete. “We always have to come to a very practical level and ask what is really needed,” he continued. “Storytelling is one thing. Collaboration is one thing. But opening the possibility of distribution is another.”

When art begins to feel like a luxury

For Data Tavadze, the 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia coincided with his first season in theatre. The war immediately rendered the company’s previous plans irrelevant. “Absolutely nothing was relevant anymore,” he recalled. “We immediately began asking what we could actually do.”

Artists became involved in humanitarian work, visited displaced families and began recording interviews. Yet the crisis also produced a profound feeling of professional uselessness. If people needed food, shelter and physical protection, what could a theatre director offer?

“We felt that nobody needed theatre at that moment,” Tavadze said. “Actors were becoming soldiers. We were trying to support displaced people and visit the camps. We could not tell the story immediately.”

Invitations from international festivals eventually reminded them that the testimonies they were collecting could also become part of their artistic work. “We realised that we could tell the story,” he said. “We could bring these people onto the stage. Without those commissions, we had the feeling that nobody needed us as directors or writers.”

The same process of delegitimisation is now being used against Georgian artists, he argued, but in a more systematic form. Artists are ridiculed for protesting, denied funding, removed from institutions or blacklisted. Their work is presented as unprofessional, marginal or socially irrelevant.

“Propaganda is doing everything to make artists feel small,” Tavadze said. “They ridicule them every day. They ask, ‘What kind of artists are you? You are standing outside and screaming. You should be on stage.’ You are fired from your job, your job is destroyed and you begin thinking that perhaps it would be better to forget theatre and do something more immediate or useful.”

Yet this is precisely the moment in which artists must resist the belief that their work is a luxury. “This is the moment when we really need to stand together, because nothing is pushing you to make art in a moment like this,” he said. “Artists in this situation have to believe that they are still artists. There is still work to do, because everything makes you feel that doing art is a luxury. But it is not.”

A theatre that followed its audience into the streets

The Georgian participants described a country in which conflict no longer arrives only through bombs or a visible military invasion. It can also move through fear, censorship, political polarisation and the gradual dismantling of institutions. Koko Roinishvili pointed to the continuing occupation of Georgian territory by Russia and the way war can become absorbed into everyday life.

“Twenty percent of our territory is occupied,” he said. “It is war too, but war has different faces and different voices. Sometimes it is tragic, and sometimes it becomes part of ordinary life. But theatre does not lose its function. It is important to continue.”

Kalandadze described the psychological effect of Georgia’s shifting boundary line with the Russian-occupied territories, a “creeping border” that moves gradually and creates a permanent sense of danger approaching.

The fear of another war, he argued, has become politically useful. It encourages silence and presents submission as a form of protection. Yet artists face another danger when their theatres become bubbles occupied only by audiences who already agree with them.

“My audience is made up of people who agree with me, and I don’t really like that,” Kalandadze said. “I try to find ways of approaching people who do not agree with me, because I think that is more functional. You can empower your peers and your friends who are protesting, but at some point you have to grow beyond that.”

Georgia’s theatre community became one of the most visible participants in the country’s pro-European demonstrations. Artists joined strikes, occupied public space and turned theatres into places of civic resistance. The consequences included arrests, violence, intimidation and institutional retaliation.

Tavadze spoke at length about actor Andro Chichinadze, who was imprisoned following his participation in the protests. The director has been exchanging letters with him and is now considering how their correspondence might become a text.

“I wish I had started earlier,” Tavadze said. “At the time, I was too busy with everything else to use some of those moments. Now we are writing letters to each other. He tells me what is happening inside, and we are trying to develop it as a text.”

The imprisonment of a popular actor, he added, carries a deliberate symbolic force. If someone with visibility and social recognition can be arrested, others are encouraged to imagine what might happen to them.

For Tavadze, however, Georgian theatre has not abandoned its public. “Theatre stood with its audience in the streets,” he said. “Now it is also in prison. It continues to do what it does: to be next to people, to encourage them, sometimes to protect them and to show them an example of bravery.”

In Ukraine, theatre becomes a survival mechanism

Veronica Litkevich brought a different experience to the discussion: that of an artist who initially spent time outside Ukraine but later returned and continued living and working inside the country. The perspective from within, she explained, is not always as solemn as outsiders might expect. When war is continuously present, artists do not necessarily need to reproduce its tragedy on stage.

“We already have war outside the window, so we do not need to create only performances about war,” she said. “If you look at our theatres, you can also see funny performances, performances about life. I am creating a musical now.”

Theatre, like daily life, continues between rehearsals, air-raid alerts and nights interrupted by warning messages. War is terrifying and painful, she said, but its repetition also creates another, rarely acknowledged experience.

At the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion, many Ukrainian artists questioned whether their profession still mattered. “All artists were thinking that our profession was nothing anymore, because war was in the first place,” she recalled. “But the situation changed very quickly, and our perspective has continued to change year by year.”

Litkevich also spoke about the destruction of a major film costume archive in Kyiv during a recent Russian attack. Around 100,000 costumes connected to generations of Ukrainian filmmaking were lost.

“Day by day, something like this happens,” she said. “It is very painful because, step by step, we lose our culture and our history. We need to have our words. We need to tell people outside our borders what is happening.”

Tavadze, who spent several months working in Kyiv, described Ukrainian theatre as an artistic form produced under “impossible conditions”. The simple act of performers appearing on stage while attacks continue outside becomes historically significant.

“You have to make the performance before another alarm starts,” he said. “The words of Shakespeare sound a little different when you have to say them between bombings.”

He issued a direct appeal to international programmers and festival directors.

“We have to see Ukrainian theatre at every festival,” he said. “Not because Ukrainians need it. We need it. We have to hear it and understand what is going on there. We have to see what real theatre is, how it is made, in what conditions it is made and what it means to continue giving light to people in total darkness.”

Humour as proof of life

The panel repeatedly returned to the place of fantasy, ambiguity and humour during crisis. Must theatre created during war remain documentary? Is comedy appropriate when communities are grieving?

For Litkevich, the answer was unequivocal. “Of course we need humour,” she said. “We need fairy tales and something warm. We need people to stay together and feel a small community. We need good emotions. Sometimes we need a little Disney mood and the hope that one day the fairy tale will become real.”

Tavadze described wartime humour as a form of survival rather than avoidance. “It is a strange humour,” he said. “It is laughter because we are alive. Even when Ukrainian or Georgian theatre creates tragedy, the real tragedy is told with a smile. It does not become only drama and tears. It is about survival. It is about lifting people up.”

He compared two productions of Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle, one created in Riga and another in Kyiv. Although the text was the same, the relationship between the performers and catastrophe was completely different.

“In Latvia, the actors were performing catastrophe,” he explained. “In Kyiv, the actors were working with catastrophe. It was a tool. They were not performing it because catastrophe was already their partner.”

He also remembered performances continuing during electricity cuts, with audiences using their mobile phones to illuminate the actors. “The audience does not let the actors stop,” he said. “They stand up and give them light because they are keeping their culture alive. They keep the actor standing because, while the actor is standing, they are also standing.”

Roinishvili recalled that some of the world’s most powerful comedies, including Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, were written during war and about war. Comedy can therefore become a declaration that life has not been defeated.

Kalandadze argued that artists should resist both political censorship and the subtler pressure to create what international festivals expect from countries experiencing conflict.

The most urgent conclusion of the panel was that theatre’s force lies in keeping language available, protecting collective memory, maintaining spaces in which dissent can still be heard and reminding communities that they are not alone. Under such conditions, theatre becomes social infrastructure, a record of what power would prefer to erase and a rehearsal for the possibility of another future.

As Tavadze put it, “What we are seeing is theatre as a survival mechanism. And this is what all of us have to witness.”