Pussy Riot Takes Manhattan, Quietly
June 8, 2013
By MELENA RYZIK, New York Times – If there is ignominy in being anonymous at the premiere of your own movie, the ladies of Pussy Riot didn’t show it. There they were, without their trademark bright balaclavas, sitting at the back of the Landmark Sunshine Cinema on the Lower East Side on Wednesday evening, awaiting the showing of an HBO documentary called “Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer.”
An image from the documentary “Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer,” which looks at the protest group famous for performing an anti-Kremlin song in a Moscow cathedral; two members are in prison.
The film, which will be broadcast on Monday, chronicles the rise of Pussy Riot, the Moscow-based activist group, whose 2012 performance of an anti-Kremlin song described as a “punk prayer” inside the main Orthodox cathedral in Moscow attracted international attention. Three of the women were convicted of hooliganism for the 40-second performance; two are still imprisoned. The rest, fewer than a dozen, have carried on, masked crusaders for feminism and free speech.
Their outlaw status has become a rallying cry for dissent in Russia and abroad, backed by the likes of Paul McCartney, Madonna and Amnesty International, and an unexpected display of global girl power.
Without fanfare, two members of the collective slipped into New York in the last week, to help promote the film and meet, undercover, with supporters. It is their first time in America. At the theater, they munched popcorn as a slew of well-heeled New Yorkers and boldface names — Salman Rushdie, Patti Smith — sauntered by. A few guests wore “Free Pussy Riot” T-shirts, oblivious to the still-at-large members in their midst. There was a party afterward, but for Pussy Riot, this trip was a serious effort to expand their reach without compromising their credibility as artistic revolutionaries.
“We don’t share personal information, sorry,” one of the young women said in Russian in an interview before the screening.
She was without her balaclava, smiling. The members of Pussy Riot are practiced at maintaining their mysterious identities. Questions about jobs and ages were off limits; they agreed to be identified only by pseudonyms, Fara and Shaiba. Who was who?
“Doesn’t matter,” one of them — let’s call her Shaiba — said.
They could have been any young visitors to the city, crashing at a friend’s parents’ well-appointed downtown apartment, fretting about what to wear to the premiere, although the goal was not to impress but to blend in. They would not seem out of place in a Bushwick art studio.
In their few days in New York, they had been on a kind of anarcho-feminist-cultural show-and-tell, appearing at the feminist bookstore Bluestockings on the Lower East Side — where they briefly went barefaced because, they explained, they felt it was a “safe space” — visiting with leaders of Occupy Wall Street and receiving a guided tour of “The Dinner Party,” Judy Chicago’s feminist installation at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
