23 Feb 2019

REVIEW: Pussy Riot at the Auckland Town Hall

From RNZ Music, 9:00 am on 23 February 2019

Russian punk collective Pussy Riot delivered a frenzied mixture of spoken word, interpretive dance, political commentary and music at the Auckland Town Hall. RNZ Music's Waveney Russ was there.

No caption

Photo: Supplied

Pussy Riot is not a punk band. Pussy Riot is not a feminist collective. Pussy Riot is not a political bastion for the people of Russia. 

“Pussy Riot cannot be any one of these things, because they are all at once and not at all,” producer Sacha Cheparukhin announces to a hushed crowd gathering at the foot of the Auckland Town Hall stage.

Audience members clad in neon balaclavas peer up from the hall floor, a persistent and pragmatic accessory donned by the rotating members of Russian punk group Pussy Riot. 

“The band” Pussy Riot will not be performing tonight warns Cheparukhin. The room leans in, still reeling from the frenzy whipped up by the support act, Wellington’s Unsanitary Napkin and their closing song ‘Patriarchal Boner’, which lasts only 45 seconds.

Tonight we’re seeing Pussy Riot the artistic collective: the Pussy Riot that Maria “Masha” Alyokhina shaped as a core member, before being sentenced to a 21-month labour camp term in 2012. Now, Alyokhina wants to share with us her manifesto titled Riot Days - but not through song.

No caption

Photo: Supplied

Pussy Riot: Riot Days is communicated through a mixture of spoken word, interpretive dance, political commentary and mixed media (film, cartoons and photographs) projected onto a screen. 

Four performers act as amplifiers of Alyokhina’s diatribe, spitting out lines of dialogue in unison and thrashing their limbs in wild articulation. There may not be song, but there is music: a jazz-punk outfit with a trumpet, saxophone and drum kit are positioned at the feet of the five Pussy Riot members.

One-by-one they appear, first a Spanx-wielding percussionist, then a sharp-tongued saxophonist.  It’s incorrect to assume that Pussy Riot is a female collective. The group has welcomed many male members in the past, and two grace the stage alongside Alyokhina: one in sunglasses, and the other in, well, not much at all (just...leather). 

Alyokhina stands front and centre. It is her story to tell.

The performance is split into several different “acts”, the first two detailing Alyokhina’s protest staged at Christ the Saviour Cathedral in Moscow, alongside Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Yekaterina Samutsevich and two other members who were never formally identified.

We’re given an intimate understanding of the guerilla performance that made the Pussy Riot name synonymous with anti-Putin protests in Russia.

Alyokhina yells without pause, about the moments leading up to the group’s storming of the church altar: “We took a man who spoke perfect English into the church. He had a huge tramping backpack, big enough to hide an electric guitar. Once we got in, we thought, we must act like good girls in church. But what do good girls in church look like?”

The audience pauses before applauding; it feels as though we should snap our fingers instead. “We are all Pussy Riot”, Alyokhina shrieks, her fists clenched hard at her thighs “If you want to be Pussy Riot, then you are.”

Alyokhina’s writing is as witty as it is confronting, and her delivery never enters the realm of nuance.

She lurches into the third “act” by chastising the sale of porcelain eggs (Fabergé) that enclose replicas of the Kremlin. She compares the collectable items to the fragile ego of Vladimir Putin. “If you were to drop it on the floor,” the panda-masked percussionist chimes in, “It would smash before it even hit the ground.”

Looping footage of the group’s past performances and protests play on screen, distorted by a hallucinogenic orange haze. “Putin Zassal!” the group shouts in unison (Putin has pissed himself). It is barely intelligible, choreographed madness.

No caption

Photo: Pussy Riot

In true Pussy Riot style, Riot Days is clearly conceived to assault all the senses. Perhaps the most assaulting feature of all is that it is executed in rapid-fire Russian, English subtitles hurtling across the screen above.

Training your eyes on the subtitles is a distraction, and the front row squeals in surprise as a topless hype-man throws bottles of water over the crowd during a scene depicting the Ural Mountain barracks, where Alyokhina was sent after her arrest.

He drenches one corner of the room and himself in the process, while Alyokhina sits on the front of the stage smoking a lit cigarette - a micro-protest given her status as a visitor to New Zealand, where smoking in the town hall is most definitely not allowed. 

A video on the screen shows the shocking conditions in the Siberian prison where she served time, every frame a breach of basic human rights.

This woman is definitely not afraid of smoking indoors.

Despite the rough exterior, Pussy Riot accepts vulnerability. Alyokhina goes so far as to include a photograph of her son outside the penal colony where she was imprisoned.

His sign reads, “Let mom go”, and the riot in Auckland Town Hall settles, if only for a moment, as it’s clear that this collective isn’t an indestructible force. The collective is made of mums and dads, sisters and brothers, who continue to risk their personal freedom to protest authoritarian structures that threaten people’s freedom.

The Pussy Riot pair on their release in Sochin.

The Pussy Riot pair on their release in Sochin. Photo: AFP

Bold slogans such as “Personal choices are political,” “My hell, my rules,” and “Revolution requires a big screen,” are punctuated throughout the film, raising fists across the room.

The show isn’t a musical sensation by any means. Occasionally the trumpet player falls out of time with the vitriol spilling from the saxophonist’s mouth, and the percussionist loses her rhythm when she star jumps off a foldout bench, tumbling off the side in stunt-person fashion.

But the addition of trumpet and sax solos, bordering on full-bodied Ethio-jazz, is much more engaging than the empty electronica of their infamous viral music videos. 

Anthems such as ‘Make America Great Again’, ‘Straight Outta Vagina’ and ‘Police State’ do have a place in the Pussy Riot story, but they are not part of Alyokhina’s personal narrative.

She speaks in the first person: “I was told to bend over when I entered prison, but if I bend over, I will be bending over for the rest of my life.” Photographs of holding cells and armoured police vehicles fill the screen.

Her wailing sparks both empathy and friction, as the audience swings their hips to techno-punk backing music, torn between paying attention to the political sentiment and the impulse to let loose and bang heads to anarchical punk music. 

But, music isn’t the point. The point is to take part in the riot; the ideology that is vital to every protest, performance and manifesto Pussy Riot has produced. 

Alyokhina steps to the front of the stage and looks us dead in the eye. What place does her story have in a relatively harmonious country such as New Zealand? A final warning flashes above her head.

Freedom doesn’t exist unless we fight for it every day.

Pussy Riot perform at Wellington's San Fran on Tuesday, March 12.

Related:
  • Pussy Riot: Putin, prison and protest
  • Pussy Riot activist Pyotr Verzilov 'in hospital'
  • Pussy Riot protesters detained on leaving jail
  • Get the RNZ app

    for easy access to all your favourite programmes