Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land

Catherine Sullivan’s Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land is based on the attack by Chechens during a performance of the musical North East in the Moscow opera house in October 2002. The musical is an adaptation of the acclaimed Russian novel, "Two Captains" by Veniamin Kaverin, written in the late 1930s - bringing together historically distant events and the lives of two captains devoted to the discovery of the North. The patriotic novel describes the great achievements of the Russian people and their territorial expansions, thereby making it a very suitable symbolic target of the Chechens' resistance. Sullivan interprets this event as a conflict between the real and the ideal; the real comfort of the Russian ruling class against the raw idealism of the Chechens, who use the performance as a political platform to make their cause known to the world.