KARABAKH MEMORY (2025)

KARABAKH MEMORY (2025)

Maxim Gorki Theater, Studio R

Upcoming performances:

September 6–7 (tickets)
October 18 (tickets)

"During the war of 2020, when people left their homes, for me the strongest images were those of people who had dug up the bones of their relatives from their graves and burned their own homes. Both actions had the same goal: to prevent these memories from falling into the hands of the enemy.

I remember a YouTube video which showed a man burning his house, and when he was asked why, he said, "This is the end! It’s all over!" I am interested in both of these actions – the exhumation of bones as an attempt to preserve memories and turn them into a kind of souvenir, which symbolically, but also romantically and artificially, represents the past. And the burning of houses as a radical act of forgetting, which gives the person performing the ritual the feeling that they have the ability to act.

History keeps moving on. At the end of September 2023, up to 120,000 Armenians fled from the Azerbaijani troops coming into Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) and went to Armenia, including Roza Sarkisian’s father. He packed his belongings, took a few last photos of the family home, packed some earth in a small mason jar and set off on the arduous journey. Director Roza Sarkisian developed Karabakh Memory around her family history, and around individual mementos – the curse and blessing of remembering.

reviews

taz, Tom Mustroph

“The play is pure rage. Roza, embodied by Flavia Lefèvre, does not simply recount the flight and expulsion of the Armenian population from Artsakh between 2020 and 2023. She tears the story straight from her own entrails.”
“Through numerous slapstick interludes – such as selling soil from Artsakh – Lefèvre and her fellow performers, Alexandra Malatskovska and Tim Freudensprung, repeatedly break the fury. Yet grotesque and rage also fuel one another.”

Komedia o ludobójstwie | Didaskalia 187/188, Ewa Bal

“Sarkisian is not a director who uses theatre to demand redress… she has always looked with distrust and from an angle at any manifestations of homogeneous collective identity.”…In her performance the subject of analysis becomes two seemingly contradictory functions of memory: deliberate forgetting and the involuntary urge to commemorate…Roza Sarkisian does everything to avoid slipping into the tone of a martyr-like vivisection of her own life. She transforms stage reality into a theatrical laboratory of trial and error…
…Memory and nostalgic longing for home are presented here as vomiting and defecation… memory and nostalgia, like diarrhea and vomiting, appear as an indecent, uncontrollable, sudden and embarrassing bodily function…Instead of reinforcing structures of memory, Sarkisian piles up diverse mediations on stage in order to examine their external forms – at times comic, at times terrifying…The performance becomes a necessary laboratory of representation, commemoration and working-through of trauma, where liberating bursts of laughter coexist with horror and dread.”

team

Director: Roza Sarkisian
Stage design: Dana Kavelina
Costume: Dana Kavelina, Julia Radewald
Music: Alexandra Malatskovska
Video: Magda Mosiewicz
Lighting design: Daniel Krawietz
Dramaturgy: Johannes Kirsten

cast

Tim Freudensprung
Flavia Lefèvre
Alexandra Malatskovska

festivals

Im Rahmen von 100 + 10 – Armenian Allegories

trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl1DsfSG5fQ&t=1s

Roza Sarkisian is an Ukrainian theatre director and curator. Her innovative work explores themes of memory, identity, and resistance, often employing queer art strategies and documentary theatre techniques.

Roza Sarkisian holds degrees in Theatre Directing from the National University of Arts named after I. P. Kotlyarevsky in Kharkiv (2012) and in Political Sociology from V. N. Karazin National University in Kharkiv (2009). From 2014 to 2017, she served as the artistic director of Kharkiv’s independent theatre DeFacto. From 2017 to 2019, she was the principal theatre director at the First Ukrainian Academic Theatre for Children and Youth in Lviv, and during the same period, also worked at the National Academic Drama and Musical Theatre in Ivano-Frankivsk.

Her notable works include My Grandfather Dug. My Father Dug. But I Won’t (a Ukrainian-Polish co-production, co-directed with Agnieszka Błońska, 2016), The Great Filter Theory (Theatre of Contemporary Dialogue, Poltava, 2017), Psychosis (Actor’s Theatre in Kyiv, 2018), Beautiful, Beautiful, Beautiful Times (First Theatre in Lviv, 2018), and Macbeth (Lesya Ukrainka Academic Drama Theatre in Lviv, 2019). Additional acclaimed works include H-effect, based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine (a Ukrainian-Polish-German co-production, NGO "Art-Dialog", 2020), Radio Mariia by Joanna Wichowska and Krysia Bednarek (Powszechny Theatre in Warsaw, 2022), Ship. Bridge. Body (a co-production of the Theatre of Playwrights in Kyiv, Schaubühne Lindenfels in Leipzig, and Festspielhaus Hellerau, Dresden, 2023), and Fucking Truffaut (a co-production with Reszka Foundation, Dramatic Theatre in Warsaw, and Gorki Theater in Berlin, 2023), Karabakh Memory (Gorki Theater in Berlin, 2025).

Her productions focus on themes of collective and individual memory, national identity, non-normativity, power, and social oppression. She combines radical imagination with queer art strategies, often using devised theatre techniques, personal stories, and elements of (post-)documentary theatre and autoethnography to connect personal experiences with broader social contexts and explore the boundaries between reality and fiction. Working with both professional and non-professional actors, she rethinks conventional aesthetics, introduces new ways of thinking, and creates space for alternative narratives. Her works have been recognized with several awards and invitations to festivals in Ukraine and internationally.

Roza has been recognized with several prestigious accolades, including winning the British Council Ukraine's Taking the Stage 2017 competition, the Gaude Polonia Scholarship 2017 from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of Poland, International Mobility Grants through Culture Bridges, the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation Scholarship, Culture Moves Europe, the Artistic Scholarship of the President of Ukraine for 2019/2020, and the Warsaw City Artistic Scholarship in 2023. She was also named "Personality of the Year 2018" in the Theatre category in Lviv.

In addition to her theatre work, Roza has initiated and curated various artistic and educational projects for young people and children, including Desant UA: Independent Ukrainian Theatres Review (2017, Zbigniew Raszewski Theatre Institute, Warsaw), Drama Teen Lab (2019, Lviv), and Young Directors for Children (2018, Lviv). She has also been involved in projects such as Voices of the Neighborhood (2019, Lviv), Documentary Theatre for Children Evacuated from near Kyiv (2022/2023, Kahl-am-Main, Germany), Korczak Festival: Focus on Ukraine (2022, Warsaw), and Film and Theatre Workshops (2022, Warsaw). Roza has led numerous workshops for teenagers and has created performances featuring young non-professional actors and people with disabilities.