"We do not hate Russians, but disgust and abomination, which are pure evil": the VI International Theater Congress was held in Kyiv's "Golden Gate" theater

What are we talking about when we talk about war?

According to curator Olena Apchel, the beginning of the war on February 20, 2014 semantically and emotionally coincided with the results of the Revolution of Dignity. The number of reflections that took place at that time and were embodied in the form of modern drama can be compared with today and it can be said that these are two great waves. However, the difference is that most of this experience for many Ukrainians was very distant and abstract for the first 4-5 years of the war, and then simply disappeared.

"Obviously, everything we are talking about now has a multi-level structure. When we talk about war, we talk about our identity, and about our memory, and about our postmemory, and about the aesthetics of remembering and not remembering, and about stigmatization, and about the experience of migration, the experience of the impossibility of receiving reparations Obviously, this is a very broad topic," Olena Apchel shared.

Has the social role of the theater changed with the full-scale invasion?

According to Anastasia Hayshenets, head of the "Performative Arts" department of the Ukrainian Institute, when we talk about the social role of theater, we also have to raise the issue of responsibility and irresponsibility to society. In her opinion, in recent years, the Ukrainian theater has taken a huge step in realizing its own influence on society.

"The social role of the theater should meet two tasks - personality development and accessibility to various groups of citizens. Unfortunately, until recently, Ukrainian theater did not fit into any of these categories. However, it so happened that we are all forced to jump above our heads. The theater is no exception, as a social construct, and it is developing in the same way," noted Gaishenets.

However, the speaker noted, the task of the Ukrainian theater at the moment is simply to exist, since the main goal of the enemy is to make us cease to exist.

What is the theater for during the war?

This question was raised during the discussion by the head of the Polish theater CHOREA, Tomasz Rodowych. According to him, he was inspired by the statement of the theater scholar Maya Garbuzyuk (1965-2023) that the Ukrainian identity is built on hatred, "we understand and know who we are precisely because of the hatred we feel for Russians."

"We not only can, we have to do theater during the war. It is something that can give hope and give meaning. Many people now lose meaning in their lives, lose their families, lose their husbands, brothers, but it is thanks to the theater that we can say that there is hope. Hope to be creative, to continue life. It is through the theater that we can show and say that it makes sense to be a person, and show what it's like to be a person," Tomasz Rodovych emphasized.

As part of the congress, there was also a screening of the performative reading-reflection "News from the past — a performance created in distant Munich during the war" with the participation of "Golden Gate" actors Dmytro Oliynyk and Vitalina Bibliv. This is a reflection on the performance that Stas Zhirkov created together with producer Martin Valdes-Stauber. According to the plot, four actors meet to record a radio film. Two Ukrainian and two German actors take us back to the years 1931-1941 and try to reflect on the tragic pages of the history of Ukraine and Germany: the Holodomor, the massacred revival, occupation, deportation, Babyn Yar, Hitler's rise to power.

The play was shown several times in the "Münchner Kammerspiele" theater in Germany. During the discussion of the performative reading, the actor Dmytro Oliynyk said that after the screenings in Munich, there were also discussions at which the German audience said that they had learned such things about their own history that they had not guessed before.

The congress was held with the support of the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation.