Belarusian play starring Olympic basketball player sheds light on life under a repressive regime

Katsiaryna (Katya) Snytsina was a professional basketball player in London when the Belarus Free Theatre recruited her to star in a play about her life. 

Snytsina, an Olympian who is originally from Belarus, has not returned to the country after becoming an outspoken critic of the Belarusian government’s imprisonment and murder of protesters after its disputed 2020 presidential election. She is also out as a lesbian, which is stigmatized in the country. 

While Snytsina was never officially banned from Belarus, she said she realized that “as soon as they check your passport on the border, they will invite you to the small room and you will just stay there probably forever.”

“KS6: Small Forward,” referencing her initials, the number on her uniform and her basketball position until she recently retired, opened this week at LaMama in New York City where it runs through October. The show will also be livestreamed for viewers in Belarus.

As Snytsina performs a monologue — accompanied by music by DJ Blanka Barbara — she moves around the stage, dribbling basketballs and speaking in sports metaphors. 

The play is based on hours of interviews led by Natalia Kaliada, who cofounded the theater company, and her husband and co-artistic director, Nicolai Khalezin. Kaliada said that they sought out Snytsina because they were moved by her story, which touches on what it’s like to be a dissident under a dictatorship. 

“Katya is a basketball player,” Kaliada said. “She is not a dancer. She is not a performer. And we want Katya to be Katya.”

For these artists, that is only possible in exile. The Belarus Free Theatre has been banned in Belarus. 

The company produces kinetic, stylized pieces that shed a light on the repressive regime of Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko. From its start almost 20 years ago, the Belarus Free Theatre has had to operate underground.

Kaliada said that when the group did its first show, a production of the English playwright Sarah Kane’s “Psychosis 4:48,” no venue would rent a performance space to them.

“In this particular show, you talk about sexual minorities, about mental issues, about suicide,” she recalled. “They said, ‘We don’t have such issues in Belarus.’”

This, of course, was a lie, she said — Belarus has a high rate of suicide and domestic violence while being “LGBTQI+ [is] completely banned, [and] hate crimes [are] happening.”

Kaliada had worked for the American Embassy in Minsk, while Khalezin was an editor who had his newspapers shut down. 

The couple came up with various ways to present their work under the radar.  They’d pretend they were having a wedding and the guests would be the audience. They also advertised their shows in public restrooms.

In 2011, Kaliada and Khalezin fled the country, but the Belarus Free Theatre continued; the artistic directors met with actors over Skype and put on shows in garages and apartments in Minsk, away from the eyes and ears of the KGB, the former Russian secret police. They also staged shows in other countries.

But after the disputed election of Lukashenko in 2020 launched widespread protests across Belarus, other company members fled, first to Ukraine, and then, after the war began there, to Poland and England.

Snytsina, who became familiar to Kaliada and Khalezin after she attended the company’s shows in London, said that she misses her native land and her family. But she said that she doesn’t want Lukashenko to stop her from enjoying her life. And, she feels a responsibility to people back home. 

“This is a great way to help my country, because inside of the country, people can’t speak out loud anymore,” she said. “So, it’s become my job — it’s our job to do it, to tell the world our story and keep fighting the way we can.”