皇家华人

This talk examines two actresses, Sofia Fedortseva (1900-1988) and her friend Hanna Babiivna听(1897-1979), both small-town girls from Habsburg Galicia who became leading actresses in Soviet Ukraine. These Galicia girls traveled difficult roads, crossing borders, frontlines, and cultural infrastructures as they experienced the full weight of the Soviet century, including the gulag, the purges, and yet also the enormous flourishing of avant-garde theater.

听My talk will tell their story, and will show how actresses moved on 鈥渢heatrical trade routes,鈥� in Nic Leonhardt鈥檚 and Christopher Balme鈥檚 phrasing. Their lives break the geographic categories so persistent in theater history, which divides explorations of theatrical culture into European, Russian, and various national theater histories. The recent global turn in theater history interrogates these categories, but 鈥済lobal鈥� generally comprises the western empires or the decolonizing postwar world--not the multiethnic borderlands of Eastern Europe. This circulation of actresses suggests new avenues of research for theater history: lives lived in motion help us understand the production and consumption of theater.听

听Ultimately, why are actresses so often understudied? Their lives shows the听longue dur茅e听of theater careers, shifting our focus from the avant-garde to the everyday, from repression to survival, from male directors to the women whose long careers made their vision possible.听Halychanky听is part of a larger book project,听Comrade Actress: Soviet Ukrainian Actresses on Stage and Behind the Scenes, which explores the revolutionary avant-garde, Stalinist theatrical culture, and post-Soviet theater through the lens of Eastern European women.

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