Dying Swan
Human rights political protest during the Winter Olympic Games took place in Russia in 2014, when were approved laws criminalized gay “propaganda” and “insult of feelings religious people”, and laws limiting the right to meeting in public spaces and obligated NGO to register as “foreign agencies”. “The Swan in handcuffs successfully represented the process of the death of the last rights and freedoms in the country and protested against it. “Fokine’s Dying Swan depicted the death of a nineteenth-century ballet icon”, but in contemporary Russia, the Swan showed the death of possibilities for any democratic development in the near future <…> This short requiem to freedoms performed with-out an audience in terrible weather conditions was a real theatrical critique accepted even in authoritarian Russia since the critical part was not straightforward but hidden under the layers of historical and aesthetic connotations.” – Elena Yushkova. Dying Swan fights for human rights: a case from recent Russian history.