Guest Blog: Josephine Burton On Drama, Revolution and Clubbing in the Dacha

This summer, we throw up open the doors to our Dacha: a Russian country house, owned and peopled by the Popov Family and their friends and family in Vyritsa, just outside Petrograd. It's 1917 and revolution is in the air.

Over the course of a month, our time-travelling Dacha gradually moves through the turbulent year, a century ago, exploring the changing environment and leadership, through performance and conversation.

Our Dacha is a beautiful installation - a little world, lost in time, full of books, games, chess and pictures of family members on the walls, complete with a working samovar providing continual black tea with homemade jam or milk if you must, and a variety of biscuits and sweets. It's also a playful space for us at Dash Arts to push the boundaries between the art forms.

Our Dacha can be, at different point in the day or night, a venue for live music in the kitchen, a place to hear and participate in an impromptu staging of the latest play from Petrograd or Moscow, a forum for heated political debate around the table, a cinema where we project films onto a homemade screen in the conservatory, and finally a club as we push the wicker furniture to one side and whip the Dacha into a frenzy with our DJ's punky tunes.

I find our Dacha a joyous experience. A home from home. A nostalgic environment which carries some essence of a summer retreat that is familiar to our Russian or post-Soviet guests, and a fascinating window into a world for those who know little of dacha culture and the region from which it springs.

They learn pretty quick however. Our audiences become essential members of the Dacha household - taking part in performances, joining in games and consuming all the sweets in the cupboard. Often they move in for the day. I've watched some visitors pop out to the shops and return to make sandwiches for guests at the kitchen table. And others who become family members, taking on official roles in the fabric of the Dacha.

One of my most magical Dacha experiences came from an audience member who asked if they might sing a short song at the conclusion of a play performance. We gave her the floor and she floored us all. We've since invited Polina Proutskaya to sing with her extraordinary polyphonic choir, Izba Voices, in the Dacha several times. I'm thrilled that Izba will be back at 5.30pm on Sunday 9 July.

This is the fourth summer that we've revisited the Dacha. Each time is slightly different - last year we based ourselves in Ukraine, often we time travel our way deeper into the Soviet period and explore the challenges of living under the long shadow of Stalin, and generally we only exist for a long weekend before packing up and moving our circus elsewhere or back into storage.

This year, the Dacha experiment continues: we're at Rich Mix for a whole month, working slowly across 1917 rather than through the century. We've invited Jay Rayner's Kitchen Cabinet on BBC Radio 4 to record from our Dacha (11 July) and also students from East 15 Acting School to create new site-specific new work (throughout the month including 6, 7 and 9 July).

And for the first time ever, we'll go through the night on Saturday 1 July as part of Art Night. From 6pm to 6am, we'll present 10 Days that Shook the World, with performers, musicians, DJs and films, that will take you through the Revolution in St Petersburg in 1917 that changed the world.

The audience will become participants in a unique impromptu staging of John Reed's thrilling first-hand account. The improvised staging will be scheduled through the night and interspersed with electric gigs, pulsating DJ sets and movies - all in the Dacha space. Survivors will be sent out into the early morning full of Russian breakfast and, we hope, the memory of a never-to-be-repeated experience.

Our final destination for the Dacha is at Latitude Festival this summer in the Faraway Forest. The location that inspired its creation in 2014 and a fitting place for us to bid it farewell before we start our next big Dash Arts project, EU-Topia, in 2018.

Find full Dacha dates and venues here