PEOPLE LIVE HERE

The performance People live here wants to draw attention to the fact that even though refugees from war zones often have heartbreaking stories behind them, they are also people with momentary human needs, joys and concerns, and perceiving them only through their status of war refugee can easily lead to exploitation and objectification – even in a theatre setting. 

The performance was created through a collaboration between Divadlo Láska Theatre, eight Ukrainian actresses-refugees living in the Czech Republic, and three contemporary Ukrainian authors living in Ukraine. The texts were not staged as a whole, but served as material for actresses who, through relating to these texts, sought ways of expressing their own stories on stage in a way that was not traumatizing or otherwise

exploitative.

The initial impulse for the production was a five-day theatre workshop led by two Czech female directors in December 2022, where the actresses wrote their own texts, artistically adapting their own stories. The work-in-progress output from the workshop dramaturgically combined excerpts of texts by Ukrainian authors and the actresses‘ own texts into a scenic piece, telling the story of the pressure and expectations that were placed on the actresses after leaving Ukraine and coming in the Czech Republic as refugees, as theatre artists and as women. The result of the workshop was so intense that in the spring of 2023, the performance People live here was created and premiered on April 22 at the International Theatre Festival of Freedom in Uzhhorod.