Public Arts Funding Leads To Self-Censorship, Says Leader Of Famed Dissident Underground Theater

Natalia Kaliada, co-founder of Belarus Free Theatre: “Creative conformism is blooming in democratic countries, and so you have to ask whether the only way to secure funding today is to create safe art … I paid the price, and my family paid the price, for speaking our minds freely while living under a dictatorship. Now, living in a democracy, I start to develop a fear of speaking freely in our shows in case we will lose our funding.”