Academic puppets of Donetsk
How long has it been since we last played with a doll? Now that we are grownups, dolls and puppets are part of our distant childhood, and are toys that our grandchildren play with. However, some serious-minded adults in Ukraine have dedicated their lives to puppets, like the members of Kyiv’s Academic Puppet Theater, which recently hosted the 5th International Puppet Festival involving puppeteers from Lodz (Poland), Zemun (Serbia), Brest (Belarus), and the Ukrainian cities of Cherkasy, Uzhhorod, Poltava, Rivne, and Kyiv (the Puppet Theater, the City Puppet Theater, and Karpenko-Kary University).
The festival highlight was Yaroslav Stelmakh’s Nich na Ivana Kupala (St. John’s Eve) based on a short story by Mykola Hohol (Gogol), and Oleksandr Oles’s Lysychka, Kotyk i Pivnyk (The Fox, the Cat, and the Cockerel), staged by the Donetsk Oblast Puppet Theater. Ukraine’s oldest puppet theater demonstrated its creative achievements to audiences in our capital city and Ukraine’s creative public. Its success is further proof of the company’s high professional level. In October the government conferred “academic” status on this puppet theater, which will mark its 75th birthday in December 2008, having mastered a truly fine repertoire, including plays based on tales and stories by Andersen, Pushkin, Shvarts, Gumilev, Chepovetsky, and Nestaiko. Flawless literary underpinnings mark every production of the Donetsk Puppet Theater.
The company’s creative strategy is developed through the creative cooperation between the troupe and the theater management, which includes Viktor Starykov, the company’s manager and artistic director, who is a Merited Worker of Art of Ukraine and associate professor at the Sergei Prokofiev Music Academy of Donetsk; and Anatolii Poliak, the theater’s chief director, also a Merited Artist of Ukraine and laureate of the Lesia Ukrainka and Mykhailo Sadovsky prizes. The literary component of the theater is the responsibility of Svitlana Kurolekh, a professional writer.
Puppeteers in Donetsk face many problems in this huge Russified city in Ukraine. One of the problems is transporting children from various city districts to a performance. The theater has solved this problem by staging performances where children can easily attend them. Another problem is that plays in Ukrainian are often rejected by parents and even high school teachers, so the puppeteers stage plays based on stories by Hohol and Oles. The company is preparing to stage Kotliarevsky’s Aeneid.
The puppet theater is located in an old and ramshackle movie theater. The hall here is huge and wide, so the small puppets cannot be appreciated in the back rows, where the children fidget and make noise. So the theater resorted to pedagogical work with the spectators and their teachers, and installed modern audio equipment. Most importantly, there are plans to rebuild the structure. The project is ready and authorized on all bureaucratic levels. The only missing ingredient is funding. Known as Ukraine’s richest oblast, this region doesn’t have enough funds for cultural projects. One can only hope that the Donetsk Puppet Theater, after acquiring its long-overdue academic status, will live to see a shame-faced government open its purse together with all those Ukrainian nouveaux riches, who do not balk at spending huge sums on their own offspring.
The Donetsk Puppet Theater’s professional level is truly high. Most of the puppeteers, graduates of Kharkiv and Donetsk drama schools, are real virtuosos. Their puppets are eloquent and expressive characters, which do not squeal or engage in slap-stick mannerisms that scare audiences away from some puppet shows. This troupe is upholding the glorious traditions of its predecessors. The company has its own Boris Smirnov Prize (named for the company’s late artistic director in 1971-99). The Donetsk puppeteers have always enjoyed great popularity. They do not perform with a huge human figure that communicates with the puppets and young audiences, because the magic of the puppet play disappears, says director Poliak. His company is dominated by the omniscient and omnipresent puppet.
The Donetsk puppets are created by the company’s chief production designer Anatolii Pavlyk and his skilled team. One could describe their overall style as lyrical and ironical. Their Cockerel has an Iroquois haircut; the Cat wears his straw hat at a provocative slant; the red-haired Panko has a spade-shaped beard, and Hohol’s horrors are actually funny, like Basavriuk’s big head flying against a dark backdrop. There is nothing fearful here, just funny. The girls in St. John’s Eve are all different but so pretty as they walk around like fashion show models, casting their wreaths down the river, singing beautiful Ukrainian folk songs and performing khorovod round dances.
The director and production designer have succeeded in expanding the limited space by adding an unusual perspective. Thus, in Oles’s tale the Fox’s home is roofed with earth and grass because it is actually a hole in the ground. The Cat plays his violin to lure the Fox’s family out of its home, stuff each member in his sack, and take the bandits far away. A mouse settles in the vacated hole, and the happy Cat and Cockerel walk away (just two meters) on their long way home. Their figures gradually become smaller until they vanish from sight over the “hill” of the screen. In the case of Hohol’s fantasy, we encounter both the principle of simultaneity (when several scenes are played at the same time) and the convincing aspect of a flowing river, in addition to characters flying in the moonlit, star- dotted sky. Such spatial effects are seldom encountered in puppet shows.
The musical foundation of the Donetsk puppet performances is wonderful. It is melodic and Ukrainian musical intonations embellish the dramatic action. Thus, the Cat’s song is easily memorized. Vasyl Yakubovych, the Donetsk puppet theater’s regular composer from Poltava, takes into account the plot, the director’s style, and the specific features of the puppet show. The Donetsk puppets are also good dancers, thanks to the company’s choreographer Oleksandr Kasianenko.
This puppet theater does not withdraw into its own space. It welcomes guest stars, stage directors, and production designers from other companies, including People’s Artist of Ukraine Serhii Yefremov (Kyiv), Merited Worker of Art of Ukraine Borys Azarov (Symferopil), and Ukraine’s well-known creative duo of Valerii Buhaiov (currently in Russia) and Viktor Nikitin from Dnipropetrovsk. The theater has taken part in many international festivals and toured Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Moldova, Belarus, and Belgium.
Once I had an opportunity to work a rod puppet portraying an Oriental beauty. As I made her move, look around, and greet those present, I suddenly disappeared. There was only She, the Princess Doll. She led me around and made me do whatever she wanted. And when I got a bit scared and dropped the doll in an armchair, believe it or not, she followed me with her sorrowful eyes as I hastily left the room.
I believe and I know that the art of the puppet theater is somewhat mystical. Here the characters live their own lives in the absence of human beings. Such personae as Karabas-Barabas, Malvina, Pierrot, and Buratino are well known. Like the human imagination, the puppet theater’s capacities are boundless. Its content is always philosophical because even a simple folktale is actually a parable. Puppets that come to life divert us from harsh realities and provide food for thought, generalizations, and romantic ideas. The Donetsk Academic Puppet Theater, which will soon mark the anniversary of its founding, is serving this purpose with the utmost dedication.
