Elina Kulikova (born in St. Petersburg, Russia) is a theatre director, performance artist and writer.
Graduated from the Liberal Arts and Sciences at St. Petersburg State University and Bard College (NY, USA) in 2019.
MA (2023-2025) in mise-en-scène at La Manufacture — Haute école des arts de la scène (Lausanne, Switzerland).
Elina 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.
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.
"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 I work at the intersection of autobiography and philosophy, historical documents and artistic exploration.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 left the Russian Federation, her home country, 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 works with the theme of state repression and how exactly it affects intergenerational memory, corporeality and identity.
