Berezillya Festival breaks the mold

Fans of the theater flock to Kyiv's venues to catch this year's Berezillya Festival

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For the past 10 years, the month-long theater festival has kicked off on March 27 – International Theater Day. Every year a hand-size copper bell is rung before each Berezillya Festival performance, followed by the entrance of a motley crew of theater aficionados, who pour into the halls to see exciting, experimental performances, and to be greeted by Berezillya’s founder and producer, Serhy Proskurnya.

According to Berezillya organizers, more than 165,000 spectators have attended the festival over the past 10 years. He said he knows many of them on a personal basis and manages to recognize the faces of thousands.

“I just adore those old theater ladies who feed me chocolates,” he said, smiling.

According to Proskurnya, all kinds of people – from high school students to retired actors – come to the festival, though some 80 percent are art-schools students, young actors, playwrights and producers. Many attend Berezillya for the love of theater – dressing in colorful costumes and holding heated debates about art.

But despite the stress that goes with putting on a large-scale production, Proskurnya finds the whole affair comical at times.

“It’s an endless play with people and circumstances, just like in the theater,” he said.

As well as being one of Ukraine’s best-known producers and pran-ksters, Proskurnya, 44, is also a stage director. Perhaps that’s what helps him turn his productions into colorful happenings that attract such a diverse crowd.

In 1983 he started out at the Ivan Franko Theater, where he staged several plays in collaboration with Ukrainian directors Serhy Danc-henko and Volodymyr Ohloblin. In 1987, Proskurnya’s prize-winning play “Kamo” received rave reviews from a number of well-known directors, including former Soviet film director and dissident Sergei Paradjanov.

Always branching out into the abstract world of Ukrainian theater, Proskurnya runs counter to the traditional, communist, propaganda-laden theater. Popular new-wave Ukrainian writer Yury Andrukhovych certainly thought so, and he used Proskurnya’s prototype as a character named Pavlo Matsapura in his novel “Recr-eations.” The character Matsapura is a brilliant stage director who during the Soviet era of strict censorship puts on a wild Ukrainian nationalist festival in a small Carpathian village.

Founded in 1992, Berezillya was the spontaneous creation of young theater enthusiasts who wanted to establish closer contacts with their peers in various other theater groups. At that time, Proskurnya headed a young artists’ committee at the Ukrainian Theater Union.

“We have been trying to show something new and original, something that would break stereotypes and help discover other theatrical dimensions. Artists define it as non-commercial art,” he said.

The first festival commemorated Les Kurbas, one of the fathers of Ukrainian stage direction. In fact, the festival’s name is actually a play on the words “Berezil,” the name of Kurbas’ own theater, and “berezen,” which means March in Ukrainian.

Each annual festival has focused on a theme: directing, acting, writing, musicals or experimental works. This year the theme is to focus on the theatergoers themselves.

The festival is an international affair and attracts troupes from all over Europe, the United States and Japan. Approximately 3,600 participants from 22 countries and 21 Ukrainian cities have participated over the past nine years. Among

the theater celebrities who have taken part in Berezillya are American theater director Ellen Stewart, New York theater producer and teacher Terry O’Reilly, and Japanese Butoh dance master Tadashi Endo.

Each day of the festival features one or two performances, including plays, discussions and exhibits.

“Berezillya’s dramatic composition is based on the [Orthodox Christian] holidays that coincide with the festival,” explained Proskurnya. “During Lent we feature the more ascetic performances; the most serious segment takes place during Passions Week, the last week before Easter; and starting with Easter it’s one big spree.”

Financial concerns have, however, put a bit of a damper on this year’s festival.

“We prepared a program that even intrigued us,” said Proskurnya. “But the problem has been banal – a shortage of money.”

The festival’s budget comes from several sources, including sponsors, international art foundations and government subsidies. This year, though, the festival is $70,000 in the hole, and Proskurnya blames the situation on Ukraine’s poor tax laws. He said that if Ukraine had a law that provided tax relief for artists and patrons, several organizations and individuals who currently don’t contribute money to Berezillya would certainly do so.

“In the 10th year of the festival’s existence, we are forced again to prove that we do indeed exist by going from office to office and bowing to the officials, begging for money,” he said.

Although Berezillya’s financial woes are chronic, this was the first year Proskurnya said he considered closing the festival. Finally, he decided to go ahead as long as the money holds out. The festival is to close on April 23, instead of April 27, canceling a joint performance by Japanese dancer Tadashi Endo and Ukraine’s celebrated soprano Nina Matviyenko, a premiere by the National Opera’s top choreographer, Alla Rubina and five other planned foreign contributions.

From April 20-22, however, Japanese Butoh dancer Tadashi Endo will be holding a series of master classes. Endo is one of the world’s few professional dancers and teachers of Butoh – a word that means dance in Japanese and one which has come to describe a Japanese style of alternative dance. Butoh first emerged in the 1950s and was specially designed to suit the size and shape of a typical Japanese body, which is not as well adapted to classical ballet as those of longer-legged European dancers.

Butoh has none of the sensational, large-scale movements that typify European dance. Endo’s previous performances in Kyiv have received mixed reviews from audiences here – with spectators either liking what they saw very much or leaving in the middle of the show.

“Butoh is as difficult as life,” said Endo. “If you are asked to explain Butoh, it is just as difficult as describing life, with its many aspects.”

Also making an appearance at this year’s Berezillya will be the Buryatia Academic Theater from Russia. At the National Opera on April 23 at 7 p.m., the Buryatia ballet troupe is to perform Gaetano Donizetti’s “Harlequin” under the direction of celebrated Kyiv choreographer Heorhy Kovtun.

The ballet’s most impressive visual aspect will be the performance by the small harlequins themselves – played by young choreography students.

The locations of upcoming Berezillya Festival performances have yet to be determined. For more information, call Berezillya at 246-5829.