“An Ocean Away” Starting Development This Fall!

Our project, working title "An Ocean Away" is a direct artistic response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

In 2024/25, Theatre Novi Most will work with playwright Andrei Kureichik, a team of actors and dramaturgs and several Ukrainian Minnesota community members to create a new play based on stories we have gathered in Story Circles across Minnesota. The story circles invited Ukrainians and others from the post Soviet diaspora to tell us stories of watching the war in Ukraine from afar. Andrei has gained international acclaim for crafting plays out of the verbatim stories and testimonies of people fighting against authoritarian regimes in Belarus, Russia and other former Soviet states. Development will take place from Oct 24 - March 25 with public readings of the script presented in late spring 2025. 

Theatre Novi Most is thrilled to be partnering with Andrei Kureichik on this project.

Kureichik is currently in exile from Belarus after speaking out publicly against the dictator Viktor Lukashenko in 2020 and being declared an enemy of that regime. He is a current World Fellow in the Jackson School of Global Affairs at Yale University. An Ocean Away (working title) will be a piece of documentary theatre, a style for which Andrei is well known that uses real people’s words and journalistic references to build a play based on true events. Other relevant titles by him include Insulted.Ukraine, Voices of the New Belarus,  Insulted.Russia. His plays have been translated and performed in 29 languages and received over 200 readings, films and productions globally. More about Andrei here: https://worldfellows.yale.edu/person/andrei-kureichik/

This work is funded in part by Minnesota Humanities Center with money from the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund that was created with the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008.