Courtyard Unities: Musical Curation, Production, and Collective Action During the 2020–2021 Protests in Belarus

This article discusses the 2020–2021 Belarusian protest movement from the perspective of musicians, focusing on musicians’ activities that were related to the “courtyard” or “yard” concerts in Minsk. I argue that musicians chose what to play based on their musical backgrounds and pre-existing repertoires and on their beliefs about what the movement’s politics should be, both of which varied. Focusing on gender specifically, I show that even a widely shared association between women and nonviolence encompassed a range of sociopolitical understandings. However, musicians also chose repertoires in response to the audiences and atmospheres of the courtyards themselves, which musicians described in similar terms. As such, particularly (but not solely) for those who participated in them, courtyards became a site of shared meaning and identity building across different movement imaginaries. Mainstream musical aesthetics in particular emerged as an important basis for collective identity.