Afterword
Iryna Chuzhynova*
Abstract
The text examines how Ukrainian theatre has changed over the last 10 years and how this process has been influenced by the socio-political changes in the country. It aims to outline additional contexts and characteristics for understanding Maya Harbuzyuk’s concept of the “Index of Silence,” in order to demonstrate its analytical potential. It also describes how Ukrainian theatre responded to Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine and what artistic works appeared on stage and on paper.
Keyword: Ukrainian theatre, democracy, transformation, trauma studies
Ukrainian society, and Ukrainian theatre as an integral part of it, has been in a complex process of transition from the Soviet and post-Soviet reality to democratic models and values for more than a decade. This process has always been discreet and has always been threatened from the outside by Russia, because it meant increasing the distance between the empire and its former colony. Overcoming trauma and gaining the right to write one’s own history is also one of the mechanisms of decolonisation and reversing epistemic injustice. Therefore, it is important for me to return to the ideas presented by Maya Harbuzyuk in her article and to talk in more detail about the characteristics of the Silence Index and the reasons that influence its dynamics.
Following Maya’s logic of discourse, I would like to propose that the “Index of Silence,” in addition to the processes of overcoming trauma, also shows the following important stages for Ukrainian theatre over the past decade.
Firstly, official history was gradually replaced on the stage by “repressed history” and individual history – it is no coincidence that Maya Harbuzyuk emphasised the connection between the themes and plots of the plays and the personal family experiences of their authors.
Secondly, the responsibility of Ukrainian theatre for the nation-building process and the formation of memory politics has increased. This is primarily connected with the change of artistic generations and with historical and political processes in the country.
Thirdly, through the creation of documentary or semi-documentary performances, in which reflections give way to facts, Ukrainian theatre participated in the fixation of historical events through the narration of their participants and witnesses.
I would like to argue that the “index of silence” records the democratic transformation of the post-Soviet cultural space and the formation of “democratic unity through internal tensions, conflicts and debates” (Gielen, Lijster). Ukrainian theatre is gradually beginning to reveal the hidden social conflicts of memory and to propose strategies for overcoming the stereotypical division of Ukraine into East and West. It is no coincidence that after 2014, i.e. after the Maidan revolution, the “index of silence” has been on the decline, which is precisely an indicator of social and political transformations.
Indeed, the progressive reduction of the silence index can only be spoken in the face of close cooperation between playwrights and theatre stages. It is worth broadening the context of the country’s political and artistic life to understand why this is important. The best example is the subject of the Holodomor.
It was only in 2006 that the Holodomor was recognised as genocide by the Ukrainian parliament, thanks to the strongly pro-Ukrainian policies of Ukraine’s third president, Viktor Yushchenko. This important step condemned the crime of the Soviet government and publicly named the perpetrators. It was also an official statement that the Kremlin’s intentions in 1932-1933 were precisely to destroy the Ukrainian people on ethnic grounds. To date, the Holodomor has been recognised as genocide by 32 countries in addition to Ukraine. It is important to emphasise that 17 states, including the United Kingdom and Germany, as well as the European Parliament, recognised the Holodomor as genocide only after 24 February 2022, following the repeated episodes of genocide in Bucha and Mariupol.
In 2008, director Andriy Zholdak produced the show Lenin Love, Stalin Love, based on Vasyl Barka’s novel The Yellow Prince and dedicated to the victims of the Holodomor of 1932-1933. The novel by emigrant Vasyl Barka was first published in Munich in 1962. The author collected and summarised the memoirs of eyewitnesses of the famine and the book was included in the school curriculum in the middle of 1990s. There is one interesting feature of the performance that should not be overlooked. One of the artistic means of expression on stage was silence. This seemingly simple technique was emphasised by the director through the gradual disappearance not only of the human voice but of all other sounds as well. Death was destroying life, and eventually, in the last scene of the play, there was complete and utter silence.
However, the show Lenin Love, Stalin Love was commissioned by the government and sparked a debate about the return of the Soviet model of government-art relations that served official narratives. Although the authorities acted with the best of intentions, the public’s distrust of such initiatives of cooperation with artists remained quite high – about the method of “direct command,” very reminiscent of the relationship between the state and the arts in the Soviet Union. This example confirms Maya Harbuzyuk’s thesis that, up to a certain point, Ukrainian society had no demand for the artistic practice of working through historical trauma, and Ukrainian theatre did not initiate it on its own. This episode also captured a certain stage in the development of Ukrainian society, which on the one hand did not want to take responsibility for the creation of public policies and the formation of grassroots initiatives of commemorative practices. On the other hand, it had not yet built up trust in the state, which was still associated with the totalitarian Ukrainian SSR.
The favorable political environment came to an end in 2010 with the coming to power of President Viktor Yanukovych, who radically changed the course of his policy in a pro-Russian direction. It was Yanukovych who refused to sign the European Association Agreement and instead signed a trade agreement with Russia, arguing that it was necessary to regulate gas prices.
During Yanukovych’s presidency, Russia’s influence on Ukrainian media and book markets grew, and the issue of Russian as a second state language returned to the agenda. Thus, Pavlo Arie’s plays about the consequences and traumas of the Second World War (Glory to the Heroes?) and the Chernobyl disaster (Grandma Prisya) became an important signal that in art, unlike in politics, democratic processes are irreversible. As a result, the “index of silence” continued to decline, despite the fact that external circumstances did not help society to overcome historical traumas. The events of Ukraine’s Euromaidan from November 2013 to February 2014 and the beginning of Russia’s war against Ukraine with the annexation of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea in February 2014 returned society to the path of democratic changes and created a demand for art with relevant ideas.
I assume that the reduction of the “silence index” to minimum values after 24 February 2022 was due to the simultaneous experience of war in all regions of the country. A significant fact in support of this hypothesis is the play Me, War and a Plastic Grenade by Nina Zakhozhenko from Lviv, which was written in a very short time in the spring of 2022 focusing on the war in different regions of Ukraine. One of the parts of the play titled I am OK was published literally immediately after the retreat of Russian troops from Kyiv, and the liberation of the nearby towns of Bucha, Hostomel and Irpin.
The premiere of the play I am OK took place at the Kharkiv Puppet Theatre a few months later, at the beginning of July 2022. Let me explain that Lviv and Kharkiv are located in two completely opposite parts of the country, so this performance, which was about the occupied small town of Bucha near Kyiv, was even more symbolic. This experience was not only about overcoming trauma during the artistic process (rehearsals in Kharkiv were accompanied by bombing and the city is still under Russian shelling), it was an example of overcoming distance and bringing together different experiences and perspectives. In other words, both geographical and worldview distances were literally bridged by uniting around a common trauma.
This acceleration and compression of time, as well as the reduction of distances, even between professionals of different generations and aesthetic views, has led to a number of dramatic and theatrical projects dedicated to the war in the 2022/2023 theatre season. Maya Harbuzyuk quite properly called this effect “acquiring signs of a phenomenon” because of the unexpected power of artistic expression.
The anthologies of dramatic texts e.g. Anthology 24, Without Them, The Unnamed War have already been published in virtual space, and the website Ukrainian Drama Translation has been launched, where Ukrainian plays can be found in several languages.
Ukrainian theatres in Lviv, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipro, Sumy, Chernihiv and Odesa have already released plays about the beginning of a full-scale invasion and are preparing new ones. During the Russian occupation of Kherson, some actors and the management of the Mykola Kulish Kherson Regional Theatre, together with the director Yevhenii Reznichenko and the editor of documentary texts Ksenia Shvets, managed to leave the city. Afterwards, they created a performance in the form of a documentary theatre entitled It is (not) Possible to Leave. It is about their experiences of occupation, flight, danger on the road, and the risk of death. These stories can not only be the basis for a performance but also the evidence for court cases against Russian war criminals who are destroying the civilian population of Ukraine – that is why the voices of these witnesses are so important. Part of the troupe of the Donetsk Drama Theatre, which was destroyed by a Russian bomb in the city of Mariupol, is now in western Ukraine and continues to work.
In conclusion, I would like to say that the index of silence proposed by Maya Harbuzyuk to describe the intensity of Ukrainian theatrical processes is also suitable for capturing transformations in society. In addition, the value of this index is influenced by various factors, such as the level of democracy in the country, the degree of participation in the common experience, and the awareness of the trauma of the nation as a whole. The lower the value of this index, the more intense the nation-building process is, and the greater the role of theatre and the arts in general within it. The fact that Ukrainian theatre today has a “silence index” of zero indicates an awareness of its own responsibility for creating history.
Bibliography
Gielen, Pascal; and Thijs Lijster. Культура в підмурках громадянського суспільства, Харків, 2023.
*Iryna Chuzhynova is a PhD in the field of performative arts, a theatre scholar and a theatre critic. She graduated from the Kyiv National University of Theatre, Film and Television named after Ivan Karpenko-Karyi in 2006. She is a post-graduate student of the Maxim Rylskyi Institute of Art, Folklore and Ethnology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Her scientific interests include the Ukrainian theatrical avant-garde of the 1920s and post-colonial studies. She is the author of scientific and journalistic articles on the history and the modern theatre process in Ukraine. Since September 2023 she works at the Ivan Kotlyarevskyi Kharkiv National University of Arts.
Copyright © 2023 Iryna Chuzhynova
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