Ksenia Sorokina, the performance’s visual artist, combined Russian and Syrian folk motifs in the costumes and decorations she created: the actresses wore kokoshnik headdresses, and the action took place around a carpet specially made for the performance, which visually joined Syrian and Russian folklore motifs. The carpet and costumes used real women’s hair, a choice that emphasized the way that women become expendable material for the patriarchal world. And the music, specially written for the performance by Olga Shaidullina, also borrows motifs from folk songs and chants.
The contemporary impetus for writing and staging Finist the Brave Falcon was the high-profile case of Varvara Karaulova, who was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison in 2016 just for her intention to enter ISIS-controlled territory in Syria. She was detained in Turkey and did not even make it to her destination, and still she ended up in a Russian prison. Her story is a horrifying tale of victim blaming, which becomes high-quality documentary theatre in Finist the Brave Falcon. The authors researched sources and interviewed real-life heroines, muftis, and Russian security officials. All of this in an attempt to understand what motivates women from Russia—and especially the Caucasian region—to fall for the exhortations of the ISIS fighters and to go to Syria, crossing the borders illegally.
The heroine speaks of these women who, desperate under Russian patriarchy, need only words to embark on the most dangerous journey.
One of the reasons the authors offer is that Russia itself is a terribly patriarchal society. The play begins with a verbatim monologue by an actress who talks about her experience with Russian men, who are great at three things: “giving advice, criticizing, and guilt-tripping.” Her monologue contains a perfectly recognizable image of domestic abuse in Russian culture: Russian men, who can do “nothing at all,” reproduce patriarchal gender socialization and psychologically and physically abuse women, the only people over whom they have power.
But Islamic men are different, says the play’s heroine. They ask her how she slept, how she ate, whether she is staying warm in rainy weather. This care is so unusual to the Russian woman that she wonders if it is too good to be true, but it seems real. Gradually, she sinks into a web of this virtual love. Some of the heroines with whom the authors of the play spoke had never even seen their husbands before coming to Syria. They sent messages or even called each other on Skype, but they did not turn on the camera. The heroine speaks of these women who, desperate under Russian patriarchy, need only words to embark on the most dangerous journey, where upon arrival their passports are taken away and they are turned into sex workers for Islamic militants. From one patriarchal hell, they go to another.
These women’s actions reflect the pressure of the heteropatriarchal norm and the myth of romantic love, which assert that a woman should be in a monogamous marriage, and of the Russian Orthodox “culture of suffering,” which asserts that one must sacrifice oneself to live a good life. This is literally what some of the women who became characters in the play said to the authors: “I thought you had to suffer for some time for the sake of love.”
