REVIEW: “SpaceBridge” at Under the Radar
“SpaceBridge transforms TYA pedagogy into urgent docudrama for our times”
Conceived and directed by Irina Kruzhilina, Visual Echo’s SpaceBridge transforms TYA pedagogy into urgent docudrama for our times. Presented by La Mama in association with En Garde Arts in partnership with the Under the Radar Festival, SpaceBridge is a live performance that brings together Russian refugee children, who fled to the US due to their families’ anti-war stance and now live in NYC shelters, with American peers to build lifelong friendships while coming to terms with their differences. The performance tracks these immigrant children as they integrate into American society and wrestle with questions of heritage, collective responsibility, and guilt by association.
The project is based on a series of creative storytelling workshops with immigrant and non-immigrant youth created and led by Kruzhilina, with the final work devised and performed by eleven young Russian refugees, aged ten to fifteen, alongside eight American-born participants of the same age. Projections guide us along their journey– their literal journey of refuge and the dual meta-journey of their creative process. Maps, video interviews, script transcriptions, and selections of handwritten letters to their transnational counterparts play interstitially on the big screen upstage, amalgamating the work of projection designer Peter Nigrini and cinematographer Aleksei Postnikov into a looming, omnipresent scene partner.
As the project is quick to point out, the central focus of the work they sought out to do was “to play.” Both director and designers paint a delightful mise-en-scène that emphasizes this through the kinetic and tactile. The ensemble moves as one, trading off bilingual lines and shared spotlights with impressive ease and flow, pouring individuality into interconnectedness. Props design by Jacqueline Brockel & Moira Zhang and puppetry by Nick Lehane & Yuliya Tsukerman accentuate the notion with a minimalist and creative whimsy, as if pulling from a children’s playroom, where shopping is fantastical and luggage becomes home.
The ensemble’s work is touching, personable, and bravely honest, sharing their personal experiences and points of view (and in two languages!) with a surprising blend of humor and heartbreaking clarity. Each participant-actor holds their own, bravely eschewing fear and humiliation to not just assimilate but to create. A scene that has stayed with me long after the play, we meet one of our participants Lily in the moments after Putin’s determination of her journalist mother as an enemy of the state, rendering them unlikely to ever be able to step foot back home again. We hear her story bilingually as she dually embodies her mother and her own deflation at the realization. Stepping gingerly into the spotlight before crumpling, Lily’s physical manifestation of a potentially irreversible, intergenerational fissure is haunting as she’s left isolated, dejected, frozen in a cocoon of blankets coming to terms with the reality of change– before picking herself back up, surrounded by the shared nomadic nostalgia of those around her.
The text of the project is bound together by a posthumous, “what if” framing device of a compelling hidden history equally deserving of its own theatrical adaptation; in 1983, eleven-year-old American activist Samantha Smith bridged the gap between American and Russian children during the Cold War through an earnest peaceseeking letter that snowballed into travel and television diplomacy for the tot. In Kruzhilina and Clark Young’s playfully constructed world, Smith, played with verve by Ellen Lauren, acts as the ensemble and audience’s Jiminy Cricket. More playmate than teacher, Smith is a comforting friend, an encouraging listener, and constant presence guiding and accompanying the progression of the ensemble’s flurry of emotional and theatrical exploration with the dangerously brave reminder, we’ve been here before, if you’d only stop to ask and listen. Regretfully, the framing device leads to a predictable deflation cursed with the Diana problem, as we hear from the beginning she would be helping the ensemble even more directly “if she was alive today.” A finale reveal that her funeral at thirteen years old was accompanied with words of condolences sent by Gorbachev and Reagan raises more questions than the piece has space or time to address. How do we mourn the death of some children over others when thousands die without public recognition? What is the role of celebrity in political persuasion? How has the role of television and video media in soft diplomacy shifted since then, if at all? Do we have a “Samantha Smith” today, and if not, why?
The SpaceBridge project can be further supported by following on social media at #SpaceBridge, where funders and presenters can support further companion pieces or installments over time, as their workshops are designed “to foster interactions between American youth and a variety of immigrant groups with the intended goal of developing a publishable curriculum, involving and training additional teaching artists, and pursuing opportunities for engaging additional refugee communities from anywhere in the world.” Kruzhilina’s ensemble work represents an electrically authentic new voice at the table of global theatermaking, where migrant-made work is greater than the mere sum of its parts and a true paradigm for radical, revolutionary empathy.
Production credits
La Mama in association with En Garde Arts presents
Visual Echo’s “SpaceBridge”
Conceived and Directed by Irina Kruzhilina
Presented in partnership with Under the Radar
“SpaceBridge” was written by Irina Kruzhilina and Clark Young. The cast features Ellen Lauren, and the ensemble features Alisa Shaverdova, Anastasia Skorobogach, Anna Skorobogach, Arina Skorobogach, Artem Skorobogach, Lily Borzenko, Leon Ladia, Mark Savin, Mars Markelov, Sasha Boikova, Sonia Tsatskina, Adele Nigrini, Alex Weiner, Drake Malave, Henry MacDowell, Nate Hatter, Sabine Gutenberg, Silas MacLean, Tiera Lopper.
The creative team includes Projection Design by Peter Nigrini, Cinematography by Aleksei Postnikov, Sound Design by Darron West & Sophie Yuqing Nie, Lighting Design by Brian H Scott, Scenic Design by Irina Kruzhilina, Choreography by Laura Peterson, Props by Jacqueline Brockel & Moira Zhang, and Puppetry by Nick Lehane & Yuliya Tsukerman.
“SpaceBridge” ran from January 7-11 at the Ellen Stewart Theatre (66 East 4th Street, NYC, 10003). Run time is 95 minutes with no intermission. For more information visit utrfest.org/program/spacebridge/.