Queer Performance in Today’s Russia, Hidden in Apartments

In 2020, in the city of St. Petersburg, I produced a soundscape performance called Long Waves—a mockumentary piece exploring how artificial intelligence is trained on children’s emotions. In an old, authentic apartment in the city center, we installed ten sound sources; the audience, moving from room to room, found themselves immersed in the sonic landscape of the story. Five years ago, the choice to stage the performance in an apartment was a site-specific gesture: We wanted to create something unconventional in a non-theatrical setting. But in today’s Russia, performing in an apartment is no longer a creative choice—it’s a necessity.

In the 1960s and seventies, during the Soviet era, the format of the kvartirnik—a concert or performance held in private apartments—emerged as a response to censorship and the lack of access to public stages for independent artists. Musicians performing politically charged songs organized apartment concerts, and artists hosted exhibitions in their homes. Today, this format has regained relevance for those creating queer art. Since 2022, Russia has enacted a law banning “LGBT propaganda” for all age groups. This law is so broad that even an online post or comment can be prosecuted, carrying the risk of criminal liability. Then, in 2023, the Russian Supreme Court declared the so-called “International LGBT Public Movement” (which, surely, does not exist) an extremist organization—making any involvement with it punishable by imprisonment.

The court ruling was classified, so it remains unclear what exactly qualifies as extremist activity. In December 2024, the director of Men Travel, a travel agency for gay clients, was arrested under this charge and died by suicide in pre-trial detention. When I returned to Russia this winter after a long absence and decided to create a new performative work, I realized—as a queer artist—that the safest option was to show it in private apartments.

In 1957, Norwegian writer Tarjei Vesaas published The Birds, a pastoral novel about a neurodiverse man with the psyche of a child who lives in a village near the woods with his sister. His life is transformed by the mysterious flight of a woodcock over their house and later by the arrival of a woodcutter named Jørgen. I first read this book six years ago, and I returned to it in December 2024 during a period of intense romantic suspense. Even in the 2020s, the novel feels entirely contemporary—its impact is profound because it’s a story about surviving as an “other” in a world built on violence.

I hadn’t done any performative work for several years. During that time, I focused on research and documentary projects about war and militarism. Over time, I developed a kind of exhaustion with digital formats and overtly political narratives. I felt the urge to create something offline—something dreamlike and beautiful, yet still resonant with the time and context in which I live. The Birds struck me as the perfect source text for such a project.

Queer reinterpretation of classic and modernist art is essential work.

In adapting the novel into a performance, I cut about 95 percent of the original text, retaining only the key narrative arcs. My aim was to transform this relatively normative story into a queer one. In the novel, the protagonist, Mattis, is a thirty-seven-year-old cishet man with faint traces of romantic longing for women. In my performance piece, Birds, Mattis is more like me: a younger, nonbinary, homoromantic person on the asexual spectrum—someone for whom encounters with nature provoke far deeper emotional responses than human physicality.

This might seem like a disrespectful treatment of the original text, but to me, queer reinterpretation of classic and modernist art is essential work. Besides, even without any explicitly queer themes, Vesaas’s novel uncannily captures the sensibility of a queer person navigating a heteronormative world—where the membrane of normality separates you from reality, and everything around you quietly insists that you are different.

The second major change I made to the text was the introduction of the war motif. In Vesaas’s novel, war is never mentioned, but I believe it’s impossible to create work in contemporary Russia without addressing, in some way, two horrific wars that are currently unfolding—in Ukraine and in Palestine. In my version, Jørgen is no longer just a simple woodcutter; he becomes a war refugee who shows Mattis and his sister photographs of his home—a gray ruins, the result of monstrous urbicide.

In April 2022, just a couple of months into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I had a dream: I was lying in a meadow while enormous cows were flying over me, followed by a giant severed leg of a soldier—blown off in an explosion—still in uniform, bloodied, with fleshy cut. This disturbing image stuck with me and became a central element in Birds, haunting both Jørgen, who fled the war, and Mattis, who learns about it through him. In one performance scene, I dance with a life-sized moulage of a leg dressed in military pants and boots, attaching it to my own body—trying on the corporeality of a militant.

I developed this piece as an immersive performance capable of transforming any space it inhabits. In Birds, I use two spatial sound sources, and each apartment venue I visit equipped with my own portable lighting. The performance incorporates augmented reality, with digital objects appearing directly among audience, as well as live cinema techniques, in which the action unfolds both in physical space and on screen via an iPhone camera stream. Audience members actively participate: They read parts of the text aloud, taking on roles and becoming characters within the piece. Using computer-generated imagery (CGI) video created in game engine, the apartment is gradually transformed into a Norwegian forest by a lake—the setting of the original story.

I left Russia just one day before the full-scale war in Ukraine began, but I returned in October 2024 to premiere my autofiction film As An Earthquake, which explores the connection between love and disaster. It was immediately clear that this work could never receive a distribution license in Russia, and that any attempt to screen it publicly could expose me to criminal charges. That made it all the more urgent for me to share the film with Russian-speaking audiences. I rented cinemas in Moscow and St. Petersburg for private screenings—no advertising, just word of mouth. Since the war began, such private events have become increasingly common, and some of my friends now organize secret theatre festivals that are only announced via personal messages. One such anarchist art festival, held in a forest, was still raided and banned by security forces.

Of course, it feels strange and painful to have to hide a love documentary, or a performance like Birds, simply because it contains a queer narrative. But this is the reality for many artists in contemporary Russia.

Birds turned out to be quite a success for me. Initially, I expected to show it just a couple of times in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but the interest has been much greater. As of the time I’m writing this, just a month after the premiere, I’ve already performed it sixteen times—in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Perm, and Yekaterinburg. Upcoming performances are planned for Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, and Tyumen, and in the summer, I’ll take the work to Berlin.

It was especially meaningful to present Birds in Yekaterinburg, the most overtly Orthodox city in Russia’s Urals region. At the end of April, just days before the show, a local artist Alice Gorshenina was sentenced to ten days of detention for using the Pride flag emoji in a social media post. In that context, I received deeply moving feedback. You can feel how much of a breath of fresh air queer art is in today’s Russia. In Yekaterinburg, a woman came up to me after the performance and told me that, even though she identifies as heterosexual, she almost forgot that there is a queer layer of reality, one where heteronormativity is not the only possibility. That kind of amnesia is the result of the Russian state’s monstrous policy of erasing and silencing not just queer identities, but even the very possibility of speaking about them.

On the one hand, it’s painful to witness this so directly. On the other, it’s deeply meaningful to be able to present work like this in Russia—even if it’s in apartments for fifteen to twenty people, and only with carefully vetted audiences.

She almost forgot that there is a queer layer of reality, one where heteronormativity is not the only possibility. That kind of amnesia is the result of the Russian state’s monstrous policy of erasing and silencing not just queer identities, but even the very possibility of speaking about them.

Birds, both as Vesaas’s story and as my performance, certainly deserves a larger stage and high-quality technical production. But there’s also something uniquely powerful about presenting it in these domestic versions, where everything fits into a backpack. You embed queer storytelling into the everyday spaces of many different people, and each apartment transforms the work in its own way. One of the most common messages I get from hosts is that the performance helped them see their own living space in a new light. In a way, I’m even grateful to the circumstances that forced this format—performing not in the alienating spaces of theatres and galleries, but in the places where Russian citizens actually live: sleeping, eating, thinking, and dreaming.