There was an interesting profile of the politics of small things in the New York Times. A report on The Belarus Free Theater, which is in New York, performing at La Mama. This theater resembles the kinds of theaters I have studied. They create a free space in a repressive society. They do so not just to make a political point, but a cultural one, creating art, not agitprop. It is not surprising that one of their major admirers and supporters is Tom Stoppard whose work fits in a similar tradition of serious philosophically informed politically significant work.

But I noticed in the Times account and in other reviews and reports of their work an approach that I find problematic: the notion that great art is correlated with bad politics. Great art in the face of repression is heroic and certainly worthy of notice, but I think it is far from clear that repression is a particularly good basis for artistic achievement. To the contrary, I believe it is distance from repression, after the fact, from exile or in spite of repression, that political problems are best confronted artistically. Consider Stoppard’s work as an important case in point.

As a very specific confirmation of my point that good politics promises to make particularly great art, I thought about a theater – cultural group I know in the neighborhood of the Belarus Free Theater, Pogranicze (Borderlands) of Sejny. It is a foundation, community center, social service agency, social movement, cultural institute, art center, music school, and theater, among other things, with its roots in the Polish Student Theater Movement. Its founders were active in that movement. In 1989, the fall of the Communist order challenged them. What is the role of an alternative movement, when in a very real sense the alternative won? The victory was unanticipated even by the leaders of the political opposition, as it was with the rest of the world. The founders of Pogranicze . . .

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