Russian theater’s exiles and the artists who stayed have almost nowhere left to see each other’s work. Once a year, in Yerevan, they do.

After 2022, Russia’s theater community was left fractured: many directors, actors, and playwrights had to emigrate, parting ways with longtime collaborators. Entire institutions closed under pressure from the authorities: the Gogol Center, the Meyerhold Center, the NET festival, and the magazine Teatr (“Theater”). Almost no venues remain where Russians who left and Russians who stayed can follow one another’s work — with one exception: Chronofest, a festival organized in St. Petersburg by the theater company Khronotop and later moved to Yerevan. The independent journalists’ cooperative Bereg published a piece by the theater critic Alla Shenderova on the main events of the latest Chronofest, held in late spring and early summer 2026. Meduza is translating it in full.

Migrants dreamed up Chronofest and migrants run it: the director Ilya Moshchitsky, who moved from St. Petersburg to Yerevan, and Artyom Arsenyan, formerly the producer of two important theater festivals — St. Petersburg’s Tochka Dostupa (“Access Point”) and Moscow’s NET.

In 2020, Moshchitsky founded the theater company Khronotop in St. Petersburg; until recently, it called itself “temporary.” Chronofest became one of its projects. The first festival was held in St. Petersburg, at the very start of 2022. After moving to Armenia, Moshchitsky and Arsenyan revived Chronofest in Yerevan just a few months later.

From the start, what was expected of the project was not so much free artistic statements about what was happening — that, after all, would have required some distance in time. It drew people who no longer had any way to see theater in Europe and people hoping to see friends and family who had left to escape criminal prosecution.

That is how one of Chronofest’s most important roles today came about: it became a meeting place for theater artists from the East, the West, and Russia. Here, people from different countries — sometimes countries at war with one another — freely show each other and the public what they are making now, as everything changes fast and irreversibly.

Unlike many émigré theater ventures from the war’s first year, the festival did not shut down. It paused. The same team held the second Chronofest in spring 2025, and its influence was felt for a whole season afterward. One of the most notable events at another émigré festival, Voices. Berlin, was Alexander Plotnikov’s one-man show Alpha Centauri, based on the director’s debut book about cosmonauts who never made it into space. It had premiered at Chronofest in Yerevan.

The third “international festival of contemporary theater and performance” — as the Khronotop company describes what it does — ran in Yerevan from May 28 to June 7. Around the same time, incidentally, Khronotop stopped calling itself a “temporary association.” And rightly so: it would be good if this project were here for the long haul.

The Belgrade festival BITEF could be called Chronofest’s older relative and historical counterpart. It came into being in 1967 and quickly took its place among the world’s leading theater showcases.

The reason lies in more than the talent of its organizers, the playwright and director Mira Trailović and the poet and critic Jovan Ćirilov. Belgrade was then the capital of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, where, for a variety of reasons, there were more rights and freedoms than in other countries of the socialist bloc. Ćirilov and Trailović managed to bring East and West, socialism and capitalism, together in a single lineup.

BITEF’s 1976 program, for instance, placed Yuri Lyubimov’s Hamlet, with Vysotsky in the role of the prince, alongside Robert Wilson‘s postdramatic Einstein on the Beach, which had neither a linear plot nor dramatic roles in the usual sense. That was where the festival’s main value lay: audiences and the casts of both productions saw radically different kinds of theater, and it noticeably broadened their sense of art in general. Wilson himself, many years later, in 1999, insisted at the Taganka Theater’s anniversary celebration that Lyubimov had influenced his own directing. In short, BITEF was theater’s breach in the Iron Curtain.

Chronofest has taken on a similar role: it is introducing Yerevan — a city with a strong theatrical tradition but almost no contemporary theater — to recent trends. Performers throw themselves into every master class with real relish: Armenians, relocated artists, and the visiting Germans who turned up for some of this year’s projects. That speaks to real demand.

The Chronofest 2026 lineup featured productions by directors from all over the world, predominantly Armenian and Russian but not exclusively. Even so, it was hard to say of most of the festival’s projects whether they were Russian, Armenian, or something else entirely. A good example is the work of the Russian émigré Alexander Plotnikov. His ethnographic performance The Book of Sorrow is the director’s personal account of a trip to present-day Turkey and the site of an ancient Armenian city; Love Radio, more traditional in form, is about a radio station that came into being in Soviet Armenia and broadcast in Kurdish.

This year’s program — or at least its first half — had a clear running theme. It may not have been formulated in advance. But from one production to the next, audiences watched different ways of working with memories: personal and archetypal, traumatic, repressed, recovered anew, and spoken aloud before our eyes.

The audiences at the performances and master classes were international. Every show carried English, Armenian, and Russian subtitles. You could watch Russian artists who hadn’t seen each other since February 24, 2022, meeting again — among them the longtime collaborators Dmitry Volkostrelov, a director who lives in Russia, and Ksenia Peretrukhina, an artist who moved to Finland. Chronofest’s format, with two or three events a day on the schedule, left little room for excess sentimentality — but meetings like these made a convincing case that the theater community torn apart by the war could still be glued back together.

Alexander Plotnikov, Love Radio

Alexander Plotnikov’s two productions are also an attempt, if not to “glue it all back together,” then at least to work out where the crack runs. His Love Radio is built on a startling fact: in 1955, Radio Yerevan began broadcasting in Kurdish. It was an unprecedented act of forgiveness and mercy toward Kurds who had once taken part in the Armenian genocide and were afterward scattered across Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Iraq, going a long time without even national autonomy.

Plotnikov named his production by analogy with Hate Radio, the Swiss director Milo Rau’s famous staging about the Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines, where cheerful DJs told the people who went on to kill Tutsis in Rwanda exactly where to find them. In the story Love Radio tells, everything at first looks like the opposite.

Plotnikov separates the tiny audience area from the playing space with the glass of a radio booth, where two hosts, Arshi and Archi (Maral Kasbaryan and Manvel Sargsyan), literally radiate love — for their listeners and for each other. Their live broadcasts, and Arshi’s stories about what the Kurdish-language programming meant to her family, are full of tenderness. The ending, though, is thoroughly bloody. The director poses the question of boundaries: where does the recovery of national identity end and the nationalism that leads to massacre begin? And why, whatever kind of radio you set up — “Love” or “Hate” — do the consequences turn out terrible all the same?

Alexander Plotnikov, The Book of Sorrow

In this ethnographic performance, the director recounts his trip to the once-Armenian Lake Van and to the ruins of Narekavank, the monastery where the poet and theologian Grigor Narekatsi, author of the Book of Lamentations, lived 1,100 years ago. The good news: the author of many productions built on sorrowful pages of history shows some self-irony in this one. At the start, he tells the audience: “I’m not going to talk about the genocide. Even though there’s nothing I love more than talking about the genocide.” Then he wrestles with his own talkativeness: his prerecorded monologue is in Armenian, though Plotnikov admits his Armenian is still “terrible.”

Russian subtitles run over footage shot during the trip and over old photographs. Here is the late 19th century: “the pearl of Anatolia, the city of Van, which never once fell silent.” And here is the present: the remains of a wall from the ancient state of Urartu, where teenagers stash drugs between the stones.

A disgruntled driver suggests swapping the trip to the ruins (“There’s nothing there!”) for an ATV ride. Poor Kurdish neighborhoods in Turkey flash past. In voiceover, Plotnikov describes asking the driver to translate a question for the locals: “What stood here before the mosque?” There’s a pause. No one knows. At last a community elder shouts that there has only ever been a mosque there. And nothing else.

Here, at last, is what’s left of Narekavank’s thousand-year-old wall. As the director’s voiceover describes gathering old stones, twigs, and sand near the church, Plotnikov moves silently across the stage, arranging it all in a particular order — like scattered islands of antiquity. In another voiceover, he describes the particular “religious” silence inside the ruins of the ancient church, its dome full of holes. Then, with the composer Shahen Khandkaryan, he lets us hear a symphony of objects: stones, twigs, sand, and water knock and creak as Plotnikov joins them all into a single “continent” — metaphorically rebuilding everything that was destroyed.

Boris Nikitin, Magda Toffler, or an Essay on Silence

Silence of an entirely different kind was the subject of a production by Boris Nikitin, a Swiss director with Slovak, French, Ukrainian, and Jewish roots. His Magda Toffler is made very simply, in the same style as his Essay on Dying — a piece shown years ago in Moscow at the NET festival: Nikitin himself, in a white T-shirt, sits on a chair and reads his text from a sheet of paper. But this is a case where a formally simple staging is almost impossible to replicate. Nikitin has calculated every movement, every beam of light and intonation. By moving his chair closer to or farther from the audience, the performer signals different parts of the show.

Magda was Nikitin’s grandmother, who survived the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. Even facing death, she never revealed the “terrible” secret to her children: that she was Jewish, and so were they. Nikitin never learned why. Her private story is framed by a larger one — the account of how, in October 1943, Himmler gathered 43 Gauleiters in occupied Poland and delivered a speech about the regime’s decision to exterminate Europe’s Jewish population completely. The SS chief spoke onstage in front of two phonographs, which recorded his speech and the scratchy silence in the hall: not one of the 43 made a sound. That silence, captured on two records, became evidence of fear, submission, and mutual complicity. Evidence that, as Nikitin puts it, “nothing will ever be normal again.”

That silence — and Magda’s own, since she never reclaimed her history or her identity — echoes in the protagonist’s halting attempt to answer a chance seatmate’s question on a flight to Israel. “So you’re Jewish?” “No. I mean, yes. I mean, no.” The words catch in his throat.

Ilya Moshchitsky, Michael Craig-Martin’s Oak

The 20th century accumulated so many unspoken traumas that they have today spilled into the conflicts tearing humanity apart. But how do we put them into words without manipulating one another?

Michael Craig-Martin’s Oak, by Ilya Moshchitsky, is partly about that. The director himself plays a driver who accidentally hits a little girl on the highway. The role of her father goes to a more or less randomly chosen audience member, who is expected, as the action unfolds, to agree to help the unwitting killer cope with the trauma. Before the full-scale war, the performance ran at Moscow’s Meyerhold Center. Whether Moshchitsky has since honed it to full virtuosity or the war has sharply changed how audiences perceive it, this story about the manipulative nature of theater — about how relative perception is, and how easily an audience’s feelings can be controlled — is staggering today.

Dmitry Volkostrelov, Gorky/Tolstoy

Volkostrelov is engaged in an ironic re-creation of memory: taking as his basis the recollections Gorky set down, he casts as the show’s characters the objects that supposedly came into contact with Tolstoy and hold their own memory of him. Volkostrelov is elegant, as always: he stands at the console himself, carefully laying out on a white sheet objects whose photographs are then projected onto a screen, along with captions such as: “The socks quote his words about science …” “The sand on the path remembers his footsteps …” Dry leaves and branches in the garden “comment on” Tolstoy quotations too. The audience greets each slide with delighted laughter, as if it were an old acquaintance.

But Gorky/Tolstoy is really about more than ”the memory of the noosphere” — and about more than Tolstoy and Gorky. Quotations from the writers’ conversations are voiced by the people the director worked with before the war at Teatr Post, a small theater that is probably Russia’s most unusual. Alyona Starostina, Ivan Nikolaev, and Ksenia Volkova have now all scattered, but thanks to Volkostrelov’s production, their voices are heard together again.

Hadas Neuman, 100 Men

The project by Neuman, who is Israeli, is another attempt to work through past trauma. One morning Hadas got up, took a camera, and walked down the street, filming and interviewing men she didn’t know: only older ones, roughly the age of the father who left the family when she and her brother were very small. We see Hadas’s interlocutors on screen; the performer herself is on a darkened stage. Like her camera, she is in motion for the entire show, walking on a treadmill. The metaphor of “running in place” has nothing to do with it here: over the course of the story, the narrator covers considerable ground. The climax comes in a park: one of the men she interviewed says he saw a man in a wheelchair who, by the description, resembled her father. The footage shakes as Hadas chases after the stranger — but the park is empty.

This bitter and, at bottom, very youthful performance is steeped in an acceptance of life all the same: at 40, the performer still finds the strength to see the situation from the outside. A broken childhood can’t be fixed, but the experience can be shared.

Alexey Kiselev and Siniy Karandash, This Is a Performance

“Do what you want today, because tomorrow may not come” — that piece of advice is probably worth taking as Chronofest’s slogan. It was spoken in the festival’s least classifiable show, called This Is a Performance. The critic and editor Alexey Kiselev and the artist Siniy Karandash made their medium chat roulette — a site that pairs you at random with strangers, fashionable in the early 2000s and suddenly back in circulation now. Users joined the video chat live during the performance, their faces appearing on screen, while Siniy Karandash wrote his own remarks beside them in his distinctive blue script. (Many people remember that script from the well-known Yekaterinburg art action “Get Lost,” which cost the artist his anonymity and forced him to leave in a hurry for Yerevan.)

The audience laughed with delight at the grimaces the faces on screen froze into whenever the connection glitched. At the same time, the room proved as friendly and open as it could be. When one of the strangers on the video chat, an English-speaking Muslim, invited the room to join him in a song with the words “Allahu akbar,” the audience readily sang along.

The random strangers’ remarks complemented the festival’s main themes beautifully. One man said almost immediately that he had spent his whole life searching for his parents, to ask them why they had abandoned him as an infant on the doorstep of a maternity hospital: his few minutes on screen felt like a prologue to Hadas Neuman’s 100 Men. Another, a smiling blond man in a carefully pressed suit, turned out to be a Spanish pathologist, the son of a Russian mother, who was glad to practice his Russian. Remarkably upbeat, he reminded everyone that death is the only thing in life that can’t be undone, and advised against putting life off until later.

Chronofest itself, which came into being at a time ill-suited to theater, follows that advice: here and now, it lets people meet and see the art that, in the new reality, is out of reach for many.