More than two months since the announcement of the tour, I’m still in more-than-slight disbelief that Pussy Riot’s first-ever area appearance is not actually going to be in the City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection, but at Ardmore Music Hall. This coming Sunday, December 3rd, the Russian feminist protest collective will take the stage of the Main Line venue – best known as a bastion for jam bands — after an afternoon matinee performance of “The Rock and Roll Playhouse Plays: Music of Queen for Kids.” However, the unlikely pairing might actually be oddly fitting for a collective whose lineup, form, and even medium (basically everything other than their message) refuses to be defined.
Pussy Riot first emerged in 2011, and gained notoriety after a performance at Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow led to the imprisonment of three members: Masha Alyokhina, Nadezhda (Nadya) Tolokonnikova, and Yekaterina (Katya) Samutsevich. Masha and Nadya served two years in prison, but by the time they were out they had become famed anti-heroines for their actions against Putin (A documentary following their court cases, Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer, debuted in 2013 at Sundance.) Upon release, they created human rights organization and media outlet MediaZona, and went on, along with other members of the collective, to perform as Pussy Riot at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, where they were assaulted by Cossacks, who were serving as security. And although both Masha and Nadya have been keeping Pussy Riot on the map since then, each publishing books and performing around the world, the two haven’t performed together since.
In 2017, Masha – a playwright, poet, and former journalism student – published Riot Days, a memoir chronicling her trial and time in prison. Shortly after, Masha and other members of Pussy Riot transformed the book into an “activist, punk rock, multi-media experience,” which has had more than 400 performances across the globe, and received countless awards. Just this year, Riot Days earned the Woody Guthrie Prize right here in America. During a recent phone chat with Masha (along with Olga Borisova, who joined Pussy Riot in 2015, after quitting her job as a policewoman, and edited Riot Days), the Riot Days author tells me about the experience.
“In 2022, we were playing at a German festival, and we met Nora Guthrie. She acknowledged me and said she loved Pussy Riot. She brought us to the US this May and we performed Riot Days there. After, we went to tour the museum of Woody Guthrie, which was amazing. He’s one of the artists that Americans should be most proud of.”
Masha and Olga, along with Pussy Riot members Diana Burkot (drummer, composer, and singer) and Alina Petrova (composer and multi-instrumentalist), will bring Pussy Riot: Riot Days to Ardmore Music Hall this coming Sunday, December 3rd. Although its exact form (which is ever evolving to reflect and comment on current events) seems hard to pin down without experiencing it for yourself, the show utilizes music, theatre, and video to tell the story from Masha’s first action in Pussy Riot until her last day of her two years in Russian prison. She tells me, “This is a protest show, based on my book, so it’s basically a live book onstage… It’s much better to see it than to hear me describe it [laughs].”
Coming along for these dates has been an ineffably impressive collection of female and nonbinary-driven support acts. The first dates were opened by singer/songwriter Liza Anne, followed by a run with Haley Dahl of chamber pop act Sloppy Jane, who were opening things up at the time of our chat, and who prompted Masha to tell me, “She’s great! She has these PJ Harvey vibes, and her music is like an amazing soundtrack to arthouse movies.” Next up were runs with our gothy, garage punk phriends Death Valley Girls, and Baltimore not-exactly-pop-punk outfit Pinkshift, with whom we fell in love last year. The final three dates of the tour, which begin in Ardmore, will feature NYC punk rockers THICK, making their third area appearance of the year (They headlined MilkBoy this March, and returned to provide direct support for Together Pangea at Underground Arts this August.)
Earlier this month, Masha, Olga, Diana, and Lucy Shtein (Masha’s significant other) released Pussy Riot’s anti-war music video, “Swan Lake.” The track – which combines minimal music and an orchestral arrangement of the main theme from Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” — is a collaboration with Russian artist Alisa Gorshenina, who remains in Russia to stand against the current war, and Sigur Rós’ Kjartan Sveinsson. “It was important for us to collaborate with an artist who is still in Russia… who can’t express their opinions because they could go to prison for up to eight years,” Masha tells me of Gorshenina, while Olga explains that Pussy Riot’s work with Kjartan represents a first for the collective: “This is the first time Pussy Riot is combining punk spirit with orchestral instruments, a really academic sound.”
“’Swan Lake’ is focused on Russian propaganda, which affects children,” Masha says of the song. It is a response to Ostankino, a television and radio broadcasting tower used to spread propaganda throughout Russia, and inspired by the more than 500 children that the Russian army has killed since the Ukraine invasion. “Children are forced to write patriotic letters to soldiers, and there was a letter written from a 12-year-old boy in Serbia that said, ‘Soldier, go home! Do not kill people,’” Masha tells me of one particular story that served as inspiration, while Olga goes on to share another, before explaining the profound severity of the events.
“There’s a girl who was raised by a single father, and drew an anti-war drawing, and police came to school to get her, and her father got two years in prison, and she was orphaned… Kids are being separated from parents because of the war… Ukrainian kids are told to love Russia and support Russia, and if they don’t, they’re bullied and beaten… Ukrainian children are kidnapped by Russians, and their parents are searching for them.”
Masha is also currently about halfway through writing a follow-up to Riot Days, documenting the current state of Russia and her more recent years, which have included numerous arrests, being under house arrest for more than a year, and eventually escaping Russia in May of last year, disguised as a food courier. She explains, “It can be an example to other countries of what not to do… It will have a lot of inside adventures, too, like my second criminal case, and my house arrest.”
In addition to that, Masha also currently has an art exhibit, Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia, which documents the collective’s first decade of non-violent actions and the violent consequences that they’ve suffered because of them. The show has already done some traveling, but she admits that she’d like to see it do even more in the near future: “I have an exhibition that I built with my Icelandic friends, which I’ve already taken to Denmark and Canada, and I hope the exhibition will travel more in the new year. I think I want to continue to tour that.” She also hints that there is more that can be expected from Pussy Riot in 2024: “We definitely have other plans that we can’t talk about [laughs].”
*Get your tickets here.
