4p.m Sunday 29th January.
Performance time. The Theatre of Displaced People are staging ‘Attempts on
Happiness’ – the final part of their project working with children and soldiers
in Eastern Ukraine. There are bin bags over the doors to the House of Culture
and the entrance hall inside where the performance will take place is quite
dark. Just a couple of lights pick out a handful of teenagers sitting on the
cloakroom table top, swinging their legs nervously, some more sitting beside a
couple of soldiers who look just as nervous, all watching as the hall fills
with their friends, classmates, parents, teachers and colleagues. There isn’t
enough room. There are people standing round the sides and bottlenecking the
entrance.
Rewind a week,
it’s about -15, the sun is out and the snow is so bright I wish I’d bought my
sunglasses. We got as far as Konstantinovka on the train and are now driving
through a white desert. The soldiers at the checkpoints are a bit baffled by
our mix of Ukrainian, German, Russian and British passports but on we go over
miles and miles of flat, glistening steppe, the occasional tree, the occasional
building, the occasional run down factory. It would be serene gazing out of the
window apart from the fact that the road is terrible, my seat in the boot isn’t
attached to the floor and I feel like I’m on a bucking bronco.
We stop off at
the winery in Bakhmut (formerly Artemsk but renamed in 2016 as part of the
de-communisation programme), pass the sign for Serevodonetsk painted bright
blue and yellow before turning southwards and continuing east to a town called
Shastya. Shastya means ‘happiness’ in Russian.
We arrive late
but there are about 50 pupils waiting for us in the hall of School No. 2. We
introduce ourselves. Georg Genoux and Alik Sardarian are our directors, Vasya
Bilous our technical director, Natalia Vorozhbyt our playwright. Masha
Khomyakova is an artist, Alyosha Karachinksy a psychologist, Lyoba Durakova a documentary filmmaker, Nastya Pugach our press
officer…I have been volunteering for them while on my year abroad. “My name is
Daisy, I’m a student from the UK.” They grin at my accent. “It’s nice to meet
you.”
Georg explains a
bit about the company. “In 2014 I came to Ukraine for two weeks. I was working
in Bulgarian theatre then. I had come to Ukraine to see what was happening with
the Maidan revolution. I was having a drink with Natasha one night when she
said “Georg, come to Mikolaevka with us tomorrow”. I was scared but I went. We
made a performance there and so our theatre was founded. I ended up staying in
Ukraine for over 2 years.”
Anyone hoping to
“act” in a performance, as one boy in the front row is, will be disappointed.
As their logo confusingly hints by the way the word ‘theatre’ is crossed out,
TODP is not-quite-theatre, but not-not theatre. Maybe it’s just how theatre
should be. Appearance wise their performances are characterised by very sparse
stages with nothing to distract from the performers themselves. They perform in
unusual spaces and always make them feel intimate by using darkness and warm
lights. The seats are often haphazardly arranged so each audience member has a
different view, of each other sometimes as well as the performers. They
experiment with different media; music – in Shastya the pupils sing interludes.
Film footage – in Shastya too one of the pupils Alim shot some ‘video
portraits’ – or rather a montage of his friends trying and failing to keep a
straight face.
TODP tries to
distance itself as much as possible from the hierarchies often associated with theatre
making. It is a form of documentary theatre, but it’s own specific form. They
do not use actors for example, rather the protagonists are people being
themselves onstage, and they drive the rehearsals rather than a director or
playwright. So their performances are as varied as the people who are telling
their stories - even within the ‘Children and Soliders’ project which before
Shastya has been in Mikolaevka, Popasna and Slaviansk, the performances are
completely different. When someone asks in that first meeting in the school
hall “What will this performance be about?” Natasha admits “We don’t know
yet. Those of you who decide to take part - it will be entirely up to you. It
will be about what you want to talk about. We want you to be honest. Maybe
think about what you most want to talk about tonight…maybe about what Shastya –
the place and the word mean to you”.
The kids don’t
need until tomorrow. They start talking there and then on that first evening
and carry on throughout the week. “We are excited you’re here. Nothing happens
in Shastya”.
Well…apart from
war, the signs of which are all over the place. The shelled supermarket
opposite where we are staying. Though, as one of the teachers points out, a lot
of the rundown, empty buildings here were like that before the war began.
Eastern Ukraine is more depressed than Western Ukraine, one of the reasons
there are more separatists here who want to be part of what they see as a
stronger Russian economy. Some of the kids complain about how Ukrainian
soldiers accuse civilians in Shastya of being separatists. And about how
sometimes the soldiers are drunk and behave badly despite the fact they are
banned from drinking while serving. In the first meeting between the soldiers
and pupils one of the soldiers asks if the kids speak Ukrainian. School No. 2
is Russian speaking.
Though TODP
describe their work as a social project engaging with rather than shying away
from some of the problems Ukraine faces today; the war in the East, the divides
between Eastern and Western Ukraine, the problems displaced people face
integrating into their new homes, in the first meetings they are keen to avoid
such divisive political topics. Their form of engagement is getting
people to connect, making soldiers in their uniform less anonymous and
intimidating by encouraging them to share personal stories, light-hearted or
serious. For example, Georg begins the first class by confiding a secret
happiness of his “I used to love turning off the lights when someone was in the loo.” The
responses are great. “When I’m sad I dress up. I put on make-up, I dress well
and I go out walking” says Alina. Her friend Diana adds, “Whenever I see her
looking that good I know to ask her if she’s ok. As for me, when I’m down, I
buy a pack of balloons. I live in a flat high up. I fill them with water and I
drop them off our balcony.” One of the soldiers describes how much better a cup
of coffee can make any situation.
On one of the
days the kids take us on a tour of Shastya. They take us to the TES power plant
just outside the town that provides Luhansk’s power. In 2014 one of the
Ukrainian Battalion commanders announced that TES was mined and would be blown
up if separatist forces advanced. We walk around the snowed over stadium, past
the sports centre, now closed, to a couple of shops, passed a restaurant, now
also closed.
By Saturday 25 kids and 6 soldiers want to take part in the
performance – the biggest number of participants of any of TODP’s performances
to date. Watching the dress rehearsal is the highlight of the week for me. I
have always been quite sceptical about how helpful sharing a difficult
experience with a room full of people really is. Isn’t that one of the benefits
of being able to use actors? So people don’t have to relive trauma? One moment
in the rehearsal goes a long way in convincing me otherwise. Natasha is
explaining how the performance will hang together. The first part will be about
‘secret happiness’, the second ‘first love’ (one of my favourite moments comes
mid-way through some very emotional stories about unsuccessful relationships
when one boy, Sasha, says ‘”enough about love. I want to talk about fishing.”
And does). As the children and soldiers are saying their monologues, one of the
shyer soldiers stays quiet. He doesn’t want to tell his. But as the rehearsal
goes on suddenly he says; “I want to tell mine too”.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes”
“Wonderful.”
It is about how
his two brothers have died because of war. That moment when he says “I want to”
and is part of and supported by the group and seems so happy about it, and
clearly really does want people to know his story is very
moving, as is the way he tells it. As Natasha and Alik keep saying, ‘it is fine
if you get emotional while you are telling your story, fine if not, what
matters is that you just tell it, as yourself, to everyone in the hall like you
first told it to us.’
This performance
is a little different to the other TODP performances I have seen. Maybe because
so many people are in it. Usually monologue follows monologue. But in this one
there is a lot of live discussion. One boy Danile describes falling in love
four times. “I fell in love with a girl. I said to her, I love you, and she
went away. I met a second girl. I said to her, I love you, and again, she went
away”. And so on. He asks the girls sitting on the bench opposite him, ‘why is
it, that when you are nice to a girl she doesn’t like you, but when you are
more gangstery and mean, she does?” They explain why for them this is true or
why it isn’t. It felt very organic and though the war was mentioned, it was as
far in the background as it could be. I suppose that means that the people in
this performance wanted to escape it for a bit.
The week
finished with a big dinner and toasts. From Oleg and Vitalik who’d been in the
Children and Soldiers performance in Popasna and had come to meet the
performers in Shastya among others. Some of the guys asked me to put them in my
suitcase and take them to Kyiv and then London. For a place so outwardly grim,
Shastya was an exceptionally welcoming and special place. My new secret happiness
(which I pretended not to like) is my nickname ‘tyotya (aunty) Dais’.
Fotos by Rafael Yaghobzadeh
