Glossary of Siren
Autobiographical monoperformance
Director, Author & Artist: Sergey Shabohin
Performer & Author: Kiryl Masheka
Cinematography & Video: Aleksandra Kanonchenko
Music & Sound: Mikita Bubashkin
Producer: Maryna Dashuk
Production: Gray Mandorla Foundation
Duration: 40–60 minutes
Language: Belarusian, with fragments in Russian, English, German, Polish and Italian
Subtitles: Belarusian, English and the language of the country of presentation
Glossary of Siren is an autobiographical solo performance about a person attempting to reclaim his own voice after childhood trauma, self-destruction, addiction, protest, and more than two years of imprisonment. The performance takes the form of a living glossary of sirens: voices from the past, women’s voices, signals of alarm and authority, police sirens, and, ultimately, artificial intelligence. Through this system of images, an individual biography becomes a reflection on the contemporary human condition and the struggle to retain the ability to speak and define one’s own position in a world of political instability, information overload, and constantly shifting forms of unfreedom. Rather than being told as a linear narrative, personal experience is reassembled through theatre, visual art, documents, sound, and archives in an attempt to find a language capable of existing between chaos and order.
The project by Sergey Shabohin and Kiryl Masheka is based on Masheka’s biography, diaries, and fragments of memory. His story moves from childhood and the formative female figures in his life through creative crisis, addiction, and self-destruction to political activism, participation in Pussy Riot, and imprisonment in Moscow. Yet the performance avoids direct documentary reconstruction. Biographical material continuously collides with scientific and encyclopaedic texts, diagrams, news feeds, prison diaries, and audiovisual fragments of memory, creating a hypertext in which a single image can simultaneously belong to personal history, politics, and culture.
The stage language is built on the contrast between the minimal presence of a single performer and the intense audiovisual space of the screen, which effectively becomes a second performer. Specially created graphics, archival documents, video, field recordings, and subtitles are combined with physical theatre, breathing practices, vocal work, and singing. The central structural principle is the tension between chaos and order. The crisis of the blank page, delirium, and disintegration give way to prison discipline and the image of the grid, which signifies both confinement and the unexpected emergence of structure. Having passed through extreme states of chaos and order, the protagonist attempts to reconstruct his own language.
The final part of the performance brings this story into the present. After his release, the protagonist finds himself in a world that has radically changed during his imprisonment: a full-scale war has begun, political and social crises have accelerated, and artificial intelligence has emerged as a new kind of interlocutor. His first encounter with it becomes a continuation of the performance’s central question: who does our voice belong to today, and how can it be reclaimed? In this way, the individual experience of someone who has passed through a repressive system becomes a means of addressing a broader contemporary condition – the necessity of learning to live with uncertainty without dissolving into other people’s voices, signals of alarm, and systems of power.