The Laboratory of Exile: Notes from a Residency

There is a moment in every rehearsal room when the sacred reveals itself. Not through grand gestures or proclamations, but in the quiet space between breath and word, between what is remembered and what must be forgotten in order to survive.

At Dartmouth, in a residency graciously provided by New York Theatre Workshop, I was granted the privilege of directing two souls who carry within their bodies the entire archaeology of a vanished world: Chulpan Khamatova and Andrey Burkovskiy. I gave them three pages of Ionesco's Delirium for Two and two and a half days to discover what emerges when displacement meets artistry in the laboratory of temporary things.

The Cartography of Exile

When an artist leaves their homeland, they do not simply change locations. They enter a different relationship with memory itself. Chulpan, who was the Meryl Streep of Russia, whose name alone could sell out any theater in Moscow, and Andrey, who moved from the hockey rink to the stage and found his calling there—they carry within their bodies the entire architecture of a lost world.

But exile is not merely about what is left behind. It is about what emerges in the space of loss. In that Dartmouth rehearsal room, working with window shades and found objects, they were not trying to recreate Russia. They were discovering what remains when everything familiar is stripped away.

The turtle and the snail in Ionesco's text—these creatures who carry their homes with them—become more than metaphor in the hands of displaced artists. They become autobiography.

The Liturgy of Survival

What struck me most profoundly was the quality of attention these artists brought to each moment. When Andrey removed the high-heeled shoe and placed it before Chulpan, again and again, in an endless circle of offering and refusal—this was not theatrical invention. This was the muscle memory of care learned in extremis.

People who have lost everything understand that survival is a collaborative art. The argument between Ionesco's characters, which in other hands might become mere absurdist comedy, here revealed its true nature: a duet of mutual salvation. He tries to save her by silencing her before she speaks dangerous truths, as Chulpan does in life. She tries to save his soul by refusing to let him forget those same truths.

This is the deeper architecture of love—not harmony, but the willingness to fight for each other's continued existence.

The Theater of the Found Object

Chulpan, who once commanded the resources of Russia's greatest theaters, and Andrey, who learned to transform himself from athlete to artist, now create with whatever materials they find. This is not poverty of means but richness of imagination. When you have lost your institutional support, your cultural context, your native audience, what remains is the essential: the actor's body, the director's vision, the eternal human need to connect.

A Mardi Gras necklace becomes internal organs. A broken mirror holds an entire philosophy of fractured identity. White powder transforms from construction dust to the ash of bombed buildings, depending on the angle of light, the quality of attention brought to bear.

The Sound of Generators

There was a moment when a dog barked somewhere in the rehearsal room that was leashed to a chair, and Chulpan immediately unleashed the dog and used the leash as a generator crank. Andrey instantly transformed his lines into the rumble of a generator—those machines that have become the heartbeat of Ukrainian cities, keeping life alive when the power grid fails.

This is what exile teaches: how to hear the present through the filter of inherited trauma, how every sound carries the ghost of what it might mean elsewhere. The artist in displacement lives simultaneously in multiple geographies—the room where they stand, the country they remember, the uncertain territory of tomorrow.

The Architecture of Temporary Sanctuaries

Watching this work develop, I was reminded of something Andrei Tarkovsky wrote about the particular responsibility of the artist in dark times. We do not create in order to escape history, but to metabolize it. To transform the raw material of catastrophe into something that can be shared, held, understood.

Chulpan and Andrey, in their fearless commitment to the work, created what I can only call a temporary sanctuary. For thirty minutes in that small room, the audience was invited into a space where the complexities of displacement, war, and survival could be encountered not through reportage or political argument, but humans saving each other through love and presence.

What Remains

In the end, what moved me most was not the political content of their situation, but the quality of presence they brought to each moment of the work. Chulpan, who once had Latvia bestow its highest honors upon her after she learned their language in exile, and Andrey, who reinvented himself completely when the world shifted beneath his feet—they reminded us that identity is not what you lose when you leave home, but what you discover you can create anywhere.

Theater, at its most essential, is an act of faith—the belief that gathering together in a room to witness stories can somehow matter in the face of all that threatens to destroy our capacity for empathy, for wonder, for hope.

Chulpan and Andrey, with their window blinds and courage, reminded us that this faith is not naive. It is the most practical magic we possess.

In times of dissolution, we do not make theater in spite of the chaos. We make theater because chaos demands witnesses, because survival requires imagination, because the human experience insists on being told, again and again, until someone understands what it costs to remain human when being human becomes almost impossible.

This is the territory we explore, one rehearsal room at a time.

Written in gratitude for New York Theatre Workshop, Dartmouth College, and all institutions that create space for necessary experiments in the democracy of imagination.