My name is Elina Kulikova, and I am a theatre director, performer, and writer working across musical and political theatre, writing, and performance. Currently a Fellow of Georgetown University’s Fellowship for Global Performance and Politics (2024–2026) and an associated artist in residence at Comédie de Genève.

I began working in independent theatre and performance in Saint Petersburg, my hometown, while studying Liberal Arts at Smolny College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, in partnership with Bard College in New York.The independent scene of the late 2010s was a place of limited resources and, for that very reason, considerable formal freedom. Before working in conventional theatre spaces, I made several performances for a single spectator, performances in fields and factories, promenades through the city in freezing weather, and developed a thirty-day performance entirely through email correspondence. This context shaped my understanding of theatre as something that can embrace any form, location, or scale.

At the same time, I became interested in experimental writing, particularly feminist and queer writing that had no presence in the Russian theatre of the time. Since 2020, I have been working in permenent collaboration with artist and activist Dima Efremov.

After leaving Russia in 2022 following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I continued my practice between France and Switzerland, where I completed a Master's degree in Theatre Directing (mise en scène) at La Manufacture — Haute école des arts de la scène in Lausanne. The geographical and political displacement also shifted the focus of my work towards war, state repression, and gendered violence, and towards the ways these structures inhabit bodies, memories, and forms of transmission.

Together with Dima Efremov, I initiated La Trilogie de la Guerre, a musical theatre trilogy developed between 2023 and 2025. The trilogy takes the form of musical theatre in order to speak about war and catastrophe, where music is not accompaniment or illustration. It is an anthropological object through which questions of violence, memory, collective experience, and survival can be approached.
The trilogy was developed in real time, with one performance produced each year between 2023 and 2025. Each work responds to a war that is still unfolding rather than representing a completed historical event. We work with political documentation, performance art, poetry, literature, and music, speaking and singing in the first person.

The three works are currently touring internationally, separately and as an integral trilogy (2025–2027). The texts of La Trilogie de la Guerre have been published in France by Éditions L’Espace d’un Instant.

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