Performance Art From Behind the Iron Curtain
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
A new exhibit at The New York Public Library for the Performing Art — “Revolutionary Voices: Performing Arts in Central & Eastern Europe in the 1980s” — brings together a vast archive of documents that give texture and depth to the artistic climate of the Soviet Bloc in the 1980s.
From scripts covered in censors’ lines to original props from old productions, from posters and playbills to performance videos, the exhibition does its best to capture every nuance of the artistic atmosphere. “Seeing these performances and source materials dispels the myth that everything behind the Iron Curtain was dark and grey. In reality an exciting underground was flowering,” said Karen Burke, Assistant Chief of the Music Division and co-curator of the exhibition.
Opening twenty years after the beginning of Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, “Revolutionary Voices” will be on view in the Vincent Astor Gallery from November 18, 2009 through March 20, 2010
–Nadja Spiegelman
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news. All donations are still being matched by the Forward Board - up to $100,000 until April 24.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
