Theatre Arrests In Belarus

"RFE/RL's Belarus Service reports that police officers detained the 50 people present, including the actors, directors, five theater professionals from France and the Netherlands, and several children.

The detainees were released four hours later.

The incident is the first reported case in Belarus of police breaking up a theater performance.

The play was staged by the Free Theater, an unregistered theater company that is banned from performing in Belarus. The troupe doesn't have its own premises and screens spectators before every performance.

Mikalay Khalezin, the co-founder of Free Theater, told RFE/RL's Belarus Service that the incident reminds him of a poem by Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakosvky in which a sailor storms the Winter Palace during the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to arrest the temporary government."
(http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2007/08/bb592da5-4b55-42e4-9d49-a35f68fbb113.html)

Let's take a look back in time, shall we?

"Vsevolod Emilevich Meyerhold was a Russian theatrical producer, director, and actor whose provocative experiments in unconventional theatre made him one of the seminal forces in modern theatre.

Meyerhold was strongly opposed to socialist realism, and in the beginning of the 1930s, when Joseph Stalin clamped down on all avant-garde art and experimentation, his works were proclaimed antagonistic and alien to the Soviet people. His theatre was closed down in 1938, and a year later Meyerhold was arrested and imprisoned. His wife, actress Zinaida Raikh, was found dead in their Moscow apartment. He was brutally tortured[3] and forced to make a confession that he murdered her, which he later recanted before the court. He was sentenced to death by firing squad on February 1, 1940. "
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vsevolod_Meyerhold)

Art and freethought are the most subursive acts one can commit. Vive la revolution d'art!