Elina (born in St. Petersburg, Russia) works as a theatre director, performer and writer. She explores the boundaries of contemporary performative practices and creates multidisciplinary projects: performances for one viewer, performances lasting weeks and months, poetry and digital performances. She usually works in the field of participatory art, creating interactive projects and inviting the audience to activate different forms of perception and sensuality.

She holds her MA in mise-en-scène at La Manufacture — Haute école des arts de la scène (Lausanne, Switzerland) and completed a BA in Liberal Arts at Smolny College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (St. Petersburg, Russia) and Bard College (NY, USA) in 2019. Additionally she graduated from Bard College Globalization and International Affairs program (BGIA) in NYC in 2017.
Elina is a current fellow of the Georgetown University Fellowship for Global Performance and Politics (2024-2026).

The first aspect she is constantly looking into is feminist and queer writing and their representation on the theatre stage. She directs non-traditional texts and narratives for the theatre, working with professional and non-professional performers and performing solo. The question of memory and its politics is central to these works. Primarily interested in different forms of memory (collective and personal memory, physical and generational memory, and forgetting), she explores different aspects of it in a sensual aesthetic, combining attention to non-traditional forms of sensory perception. Such as olfactory and tactile sensations, playbooks and long-term theatre projects.
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"In theatre I explore the possibility of translating our memory and forgetting into a performative language. How can I talk about war and grief? How can I talk about what paralyses and subjugates our memory? I work at the intersection of autobiography and philosophy, historical documents and artistic exploration. I use the space of theatrical experience as a construction for a conversation about what is impossible to express in ordinary life," says Elina Kulikova.

The second aspect of Elina's practice today is the social and state violence with which she works through her own identities and experience. After the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Elina fled the Russian Federation and today continues her work in the field of political and documentary theatre in a new context. Through a mixture of testimony, poetry, historical and sociological analysis, Elina is driven by the theme of state repression and war and how exactly it affects intergenerational memory, corporeality and identity.
Together with artist and activist Dima Efremov, she began work on a musical trilogy - La Trilogie de la Guerre. From 2023 to 2025, the duo will produce one show a year for the duration of the war. It's a processual project, tracing the course of the war and the reactions it provoked, but it also has an autofictional basis. In other words, in these shows the artists speak, or rather sing, in the first person as unwitting witnesses and accomplices to this war. These three shows could be performed one after the other and form a theatrical trilogy about this war and its different facets (at the same time, each show is autonomous and can be seen independently of the others).
All three parts of the trilogy are labelled by Sens Interdits International Festival, Lyon, France.
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