The new theater season is already here, bringing us scores of fascinating plays to see. I felt it was a good time to chat with Vladislav Troitskiy, a theater director who is hot in Kyiv’s stage life.
While his main job is head of the Dakh Center of Contemporary Arts, Troitskiy is heavily engaged in a number of other culture-related projects. He is one of the organizers of Gogolfest, the much-talked-about Ukrainian art festival; takes part in Molodist, an annual cult film festival; is involved in cultural education; and – if that’s not enough – stages performances abroad.
Troitskiy comes from Russia, which he left with his parents at the age of 11. When the time came to choose a direction after school, he had an opportunity to study in St. Petersburg or Moscow, but he chose Kyiv.
After graduating from the technical department of the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, Troitskiy gradually changed his sphere of activity. “It was destiny,” he remarked. “I got into a theater studio: it became a hobby that captivated me more and more,” he recalled.
He progressed in theater so much that eventually he was invited to teach acting at the Karpenko-Kariy Theater Institute. He did it for three years, but now he only teaches at Dakh, where some of his former pupils play.
In addition to his “Sunday school” at Dakh, where people can come regardless of whether they have an actor’s diploma, Troitskiy is now starting a new educational project – the Laboratory of Contemporary Arts called “Bursa.” He says it will be a “synthesis of music, theater, visual arts and cinema.”
Initially, the students will have to study at the Lavra gallery in Kyiv’s Pechersk district, and then move to Arsenal, a large modern arts center which is currently under reconstruction.
“While Gogolfest takes place only once a year, Bursa will be there the whole year round. Teachers will come from abroad, not to give master classes but to teach systematically,” Troitskiy shared.
He said the whole plan would be next to impossible without state support, but the trickiest thing is to find students. “Not all of them are ready to study contemporary art, which doesn’t bring a lot of money and thus is non-prestigious,” Troitskiy explained.
The main aim of Bursa is to bring up professionals in the field of contemporary art. Troitskiy says that currently “the country is suffering from provincial stagnation – there are no artists to create anything worthy, there are no journalists to write well about art. Same goes for other culture-related occupations.”
He said government indifference towards the high arts (ballet, academic music and theater) is the main cause of such a poor state of affairs. The other one, he said, excusing his old man’s griping, is the “frailness of modern youth.” He said that the modern generation doesn’t have any revolutionary impulse, any desire to say “everything you do is awful!” and attempt to create something scandalous instead.
Their only form of protest is to dye their hair emo-style, watch art-house cinema and read modern writers – they consume art, but rarely create it, he said. Moreover, it is unpopular to be educated and knowledgeable.
“Most teenagers who come to the Theater Institute don’t know what it actually is and their only aim after graduation is to work at the Ivan Franko Theater and play in a TV-series. A stable salary is all they want,” he said ironically.
Troitskiy went on griping about the population in general. He said most Ukrainians have a poor grasp of certain philosophical concepts, such as dignity. “People should understand that they have no right to do something bad not because of others, but because of themselves, because it’s against their ethics,” Troitskiy explained. “The country’s major heroes are dishonest, amoral and cynical thieves – anything but decent people. A state cannot be built with such examples,” he said.
Gogolfest, organized by Troitskiy and his Dakh, became one of the possibilities to spark creativity in modern artists and make art prestigious. During a whole month the festival, which took place in May for the second consecutive year, displayed paintings and installations, staged performances, held concerts and showed movies by Ukrainian and foreign modern artists.
“Unfortunately, although I can bring to Ukraine such masters of contemporary theater as [Romeo] Castellucci and [Thomas] Ostermeier, I can barely find someone to represent the Ukrainian side,” Troitskiy complained.
Still, he was able to name directors whose work he considers worth seeing. Among them were Dmytro Bohomazov, Andryi Zholdak, and, of course, performances by Dakh.
Troitskiy and Dakh also actively participate in the Molodist annual film festival, scheduled to start on Oct. 18 this year.
Dakh will stage the opening and closing ceremonies of the festival. This year its symbol is Baron Munchausen, a legendary fictions German traveler, who told preposterous stories about his adventures as a soldier and hunter.
The performances will be radical and industrial, with lots of metal constructions “to avoid any concerns about fire,” smiled Troitskiy.
The reason for such a sarcastic remark is that last year’s performances couldn’t go according to their initial plan because of constant nagging from some officials about the use of easily inflammable materials, like wet leaves that had to cover the stage.
