Since the early 2000s, documentary performance practice has come to lead the theatre avant-garde across Russia and Eastern Europe. A form of performance that draws its material from current events and real life documents such as interviews, articles, and autobiographical narratives, documentary theatre is practiced around the globe. However, the genre’s investment in questioning notions of truth, identity, and the stability of historical narratives has made it a particularly generative creative practice in post-socialist countries.
Contemporary east European documentary theatre has come to constitute an important space for the speaking and witnessing of real-life testimonies, ushering stories from the past, and those from the so-called ‘periphery’, directly into the here and now. As a rule, documentary theatre draws its narratives from found texts and interviews. Those who share the space with the performers of documentary theatre are transformed, in this way, into witnesses to the stories being told onstage.
