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 came up with a novel idea, they moved from Poznan, to the small town of Sejny, on the Polish Lithuanian border, just down the road from Belarus as well.

Jeff, second from left, with the director and cast of "The Sejny Chronicles" on the set in Sejny, Poland

They established their foundation in the old Jewish quarter of the town. One step at a time, they engaged the culture of the borderland, as it was manifested in this remote town on the Polish border with Lithuania and Belarus. They continue to make theater and they have a documentary center. They produce a cultural magazine and have a publishing house. They offer cultural heritage classes for students in the secondary school, and they take the students on trips to cities and regions where multiculturalism is very much alive. They have a Klezmer band, with an ongoing relationship with great contemporary musicians from New York. And they organize a New Agora program devoted to developing intercultural practices on a large transnational stage. All of this because of a positive post-communist political situation, not a bad one.

Working with young people in this isolated town and with some of the most prominent artists and intellectuals on a global stage, with the endorsement Czeslaw Milosz and in the spirit of poetry and prose, in a remote part of Poland, a major international cultural center and center of artistic creativity has been established.

I think one of their greatest achievements is a high school student play, “The Sejny Chronicles,” in which students of the town worked on creating a diorama of the town in the interwar period and tell through song, dance and poetry the stories of the people who have lived there. I first saw the work in Sejny, but also saw it at La Mama in 2008, in the same theater where Belarus Free Theater is now performing. That performance also was reviewed in The New York Times. The performance noted by the reviewer revealed that positive political developments make great art.