“‘Documentary theatre’ is maybe more known as a term, because ‘documentary’ can mean many different things,” Svobodová says. “People know documentary films, et cetera. But for me, the person, the living human being, is the crucial point of my work. I love to meet people, I talk to people, and most of the work I have done has started from meeting individuals or groups living in specific locations.”
Svobodová started her social-specific theatre journey in the early 2000s, when she spent time with people from many countries—including Chechnya, Angola, Burma, Armenia, Georgia, Belarus, and China—awaiting asylum at a refugee camp in the forests of northern Bohemia.
As she writes in Social-Specific Theatre in Practice, “the aim was to create a theatrical form in which the artists and asylum seekers in the camp would be on an equal level in the creative process. The audience who came to the camp to see the final production could not distinguish artists from refugees on the stage. They all shared a common theme through personal stories.
“During the creation, all residents of the camp became our collaborators.”
As with Eight Short Compositions on the Lives of Ukrainians for a Western Audience, one of Svobodová’s intentions for her refugee-camp work was to find common ground between people whose experiences might seem radically different on paper.
“We all are human beings,” she tells Stir. “We all have the same desires, basically. We all are looking for love, we are looking for a happy life. The loss of home is painful for anybody. It can happen to any of us.”
Svobodová’s theatrical practice is about breaking down the walls that separate audience from subject, putting the viewer directly into the shoes of, say, a mother of three from Angola who has found herself in a refugee camp far away from her husband.
“Basically, the topic for the refugee-camp work was always ‘How do we feel when, for instance, we lose someone?’” Svobodová says. “Loss can be under different circumstances, not only because of war. Maybe you lose someone because you have to move away or you emigrate or whatever. And I believed that when we feel this is our story—we are not coming from war, we are in a comfortable life here in the Czech Republic—it can resonate with the audience. We discovered by doing it, that this is absolutely true. But once we started speaking about big politics, it didn’t work at all.”