ABSTRACT
The last chapter focuses on three UK theatrical initiatives involving prominent members of the Russian performance art protest group, Pussy Riot. It opens out onto a broader reflection on the book’s umbrella theme: that of the mutuality of mediatization and Russian nation projection in the shadow of the Ukraine crisis, ending with a fourth performance: the pitch invasion that interrupted the 2018 World Cup Final in Moscow. Each performance, it is shown, reinforces the principle underlying all Pussy Riot’s actions: that they are saturated not only with their always already mediated status (their reliance on prior, often opposing, mediations of the Russia they represent) but with a future-oriented ‘about-to-be-mediated’ corollary. Each, too, has the contradictory effect of emphasizing the mutual contingency of pro-Putin patriotism and the ‘other Russia’ projected by Pussy Riot. However, the aestheticization of these projections – the conversion of the space of performance into that of a theatrical stage – enables the group to draw audiences into the web of contradiction, whilst also establishing aesthetic distance from it, and thereby eluding it. The curtain call, it is concluded, becomes all important, for this is the point at which Pussy Riot as aesthetic performers reassume their role as political guerrillas.
