1-7 DECEMBER
COCKPIT THEATRE
7.30pm

“Freedom never sounded so dangerous.”

In 1955 Moscow, a new underground movement - the Stilyagi - bursts into life made up of young rebels who dare to wear bright clothes and dance to American jazz. In the aftermath of Stalin’s death, as some danced and others wept, a single word emerged in the Soviet air: hope. 

A generation of post-war youth refused to identify with the overbearing greyness that surrounded them - in the regime, clothing and everyday existence. They called themselves the Stilyagi. 

They dreamed of the West: of bright jackets, bold hairstyles and jazz. But behind the Iron Curtain, their vision of Western culture arrived fragmented and distorted—music bootlegged onto X-ray scans, dance moves glimpsed in smuggled film reels.  Unable to truly see the West, they invented their own voice, their own aesthetic, their own style. This subculture vanished the moment the Iron Curtain lifted, when Soviet youth finally met their Western counterparts and discovered they looked nothing like the dream they had constructed.

History, we believe, moves in cycles. Today, in 2025 London, we - a group of Slavic artists who have left our homeland — bring this story to the stage. We create away from home, refusing to identify with the culture we left behind and attempting to be part of the Western world without loosing ourselves. And like the Stilyagi of the 1950s, we too are searching for our voices.

Boogie on the Bones is a powerful reminder that in the darkest times, art becomes rebellion, and every song is an act of defiance. 

This socially charged performance is our attempt to not squander our youth in silence.  

We tell the story of the Stilyagi because it is our story—one of displacement, invention, and the fierce determination to be heard when you belong nowhere and everywhere at once.

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