By Liudmyla MYKYTIUK, The Day
Among the capital's stage directors, Vasyl Vovkun stands out with his dour
expression. Unlike older colleagues, he exudes the coldness of a London
dandy, who instead of socialist diplomas attesting to his labor merit or
capitalist single family home has a collection of primitive paintings.
Unlike colleagues his age, he has a precise notion of what the Ukrainian
school of theater should have been had the process of its development not
been interrupted in the early 1930s. There is even less in common between
him and the musical directors, although he specializes in show business.
Vasyl Vovkun was the first to revive traditional Ukrainian shows on Kyiv
squares, and now world famous gala show producers are eager to buy them
and take them as far away as Africa. He was the one to transform stiff
official jubilees of leading Ukrainian cultural figures into intriguing
postmodernist performances. He was quick to sense a thaw at the time, but
now the thaw is over and he has calmly switched to market economy contracts.
He was the first to offer an open-air rendition of Europe's peak of drama
fashion, Oedipus Rex. He is considered a social climber in the provinces
and an "omnivorous" performer in Kyiv. Personally, he admits only to a
degree of conformism. Critics write that he is almost marginal, another
step and he will cross a terrible threshold. Other marginals scorn him
as an elitist. Younger colleagues from Art Veles try to copy his manner
of dressing, talking and walking so much they are generally known as Vovkunists.
The Day: Vasyl, augurs have been talking about the imminent
end of mass culture shows in their socialist realist form for the past
fifteen years. Well, it is dead finally, isn't it? Or is it dying, more
dead than alive, or what?
V. V.: Socialist realism never really disappeared from the mass
stage. It was just swept under a new wave, then the wave subsided and there
it is, alive and kicking in the form of official celebrations and government-attended
concerts. Of course, this prompts one to continue to stage shows according
to the old standard. And shows continue to be ordered the same way, as
though there were nothing new in the Ukrainian performing arts. As a result,
we still look like idiots.
The Day: How come there are names but almost no schools in
Ukraine? Are we perhaps like the Swedes with their historical provincialism
and unwillingness to sell themselves?
V. V.: We constantly hear that we were often conquered, that
we lived as part of an empire for so long, or that we do not have a philosophy
of our own. I don't buy any of this. Every nation has gone through this
to some extent. Once, visiting England, I asked about Shakespeare. I had
some questions relating to Richard III, and I was in one of the
localities mentioned in the play. You should see the look on that Englishman's
face. He had never heard the name. He didn't know who Shakespeare was!
So does this mean that the English are as stupid as we Khokhols?
The trouble is that we are living through a period of ruination. Look at
all the political parties we have, growing like mushrooms and each breaking
up. The watershed must be somewhere beyond age and intellect. First they
split, then, of course, they reunite. Another thing is that certain politicians
suffer from what I call the complex of statelessness. These people have
no sense of their native land or that their grandchildren will live here,
that their forefathers are buried here. Of course, all they care about
is stealing more and taking the loot out of Ukraine with them to give their
children a good start.
The Day: There is a cynical attitude found strange by normal
people in normal countries: there is no single "unifying", "state-building,"
or "national" idea. And the worse, the better.
V. V.: Only recently we felt we were making history. We honestly
carried out our civic mission and returned to our jobs, only to discover
that we had been taken for a ride. Yesterday's Party nomenklatura had seized
independence and was now using it to its own end. Even worse, yesterday's
convicts and hardened criminals now held high offices. It is as though
we were taken hostage by the political situation. This is not fate but
a sure sign of the regime's irresponsibility, lack of culture and patriotism.
No one is brought to account for anything, meaning that they can and do
act however they please with no fear of retribution.
The Day: What made you turn to postmodernism when staging
the evening commemorating Mykola Khvyliovy's centennial at the National
Opera, including Swan Lake so beloved by our political elite after
the Moscow coup in August 1991?
V. V.: Swan Lake was the leitmotiv. The spectacle was
about how the hero was forced into compromises: killing once, again, and
again, Khvyliovy's hero ends by killing his own mother. After every shot
a different choir would intone "Lord have mercy!" There were five choirs
and their directors were surprised: why use a different choir to sing the
same? Because every choir had a different tone. After the curtain went
down the last time the audience remained silent, so long I got scared everyone
had left. The next morning I was invited to the Ministry of Culture and
offered the stage director's post at the Cultural Initiative Center founded
by Ivan Dziuba.
The Day: So that was how you came to be a "court stage director"?
V. V.: Right. For some reason friends would call me at night,
telling me horror stories about my job.
The Day: And you tried to overcome the age-old collision by
immersing yourself in work, didn't you?
V. V.: I did. Festivities (not quite spectacles) followed one
after the next, commemorating Rylsky, Skovoroda, Bazhan, Bahriany... It
was hard to find an adequate stage image for Rylsky. Dmytro Hnatiuk who
had been his friend said he was completely different. "We used to go fishing
together and you make him into a Shakespearean character." Well, creativeness
and personal character are different things. He was an intellectually sensuous
experimenter, no antics whatsoever. What socialist realism did to him is
something else. To show this, we brought ten cages with canaries into the
audience. The birds started singing. Five minutes of chirping in a dead
silent audience. It made one's hair stand on end. A poet in a cage.
The Day: Your official stage shows ended after new faces appeared
on top of the political Olympus.
V. V.: Not quite, several more were staged by force of inertia,
then Ostapenko came, and that was the end of it. It is hard to work with
people constantly afraid to get into trouble. Incidentally, this fear is
somehow being instilled in our society. Previously ideological, now it
makes people wary of tax inspectors and law enforcement. I proved that
it is not difficult to stop playing court stage director.
The Day: Does it seem to you that plays like your People
as People are no longer needed under the current sociopolitical situation?
V. V.: There is no such situation, and nor was there any even
then. Except perhaps that people were eager to hear forgotten names. Now,
as well as at that period, such performances are very timely. During the
evening one can sense just how much Ukraine has lost only because whole
generations were raised on that culture.
The Day: This is what they call elite art. It can't be used
as a bait in a mousetrap, anyway not for political mice.
V. V.: Perhaps, but there is no other way to create an elite.
And the problem faced by the political and creative elite remains the same.
I think that the political elite forms quicker than the cultural one. Of
course, I invited the Presidential Administration and Ministry of Culture
to attend Oedipus Rex. Recently I met Teriokhin and discovered that
he was also in that big crowd watching Oedipus, together with Vinhranovsky
and Yuri Illienko. They would not even take the comfortable armchairs of
honor. Each of them belongs to the elite, and they also probably hear that
such shows are no longer timely.
The Day: You are almost pathologically bent on experimenting.
But why Oedipus Rex?
V. V.: Opera perhaps won't be my only genre, but in Europe open-air
operas are considered the greatest creative attainment. Maybe there will
be another open-air opera or two, maybe a ballet at the central stadium.
I am not going to dedicate the rest of my life to this. Oedipus
helped me realize that things like this also are possible in Ukraine. It
was an experiment, and it was successful.
The Day: Are stage directors ambitious?
V. V.: I read Oscar Wilde, although I don't read much these days.
I am lucky if I can glance through a newspaper by the end of the day -
by the way, I mean The Day. Wilde in prison wonders why he always
wanted to rub elbows with common people despite his belonging to high society
and his fame. There is nothing he could get from them intellectually. Yet
the epoch of communications carries with it the virus of artificial contacts.
Not long ago I was invited to a party, I think it was the Golden Gates
TV Studio's fifth jubilee. I was amazed to watch the Ukrainian mass culture
elite; they had nothing to their name except banalities, stupid questions,
and banal remarks. I walked out and met some people, struck up a conversation,
we walked down an underpass, bought a couple of beers and just talked about
nothing in particular. But I saw genuine emotions, they spoke and looked
genuine. Real creativity cannot survive without maintaining such contacts.
The Day: Was that how you felt when first staging Ukrainian
folk festivals in Kyiv?
V. V.: Those festivals used secondary amateur performing groups
produced by village clubs, with machine embroidery, ugly costumes, arranged
songs, and even balalaikas playing the treble music of Western Ukrainian
minstrels. I succeeded in overcoming the pattern at a number of festivals.
I got hold of real folk performers, old women wearing their grandmothers'
attire and knowing the rites first-hand. These old women are the last generation
with genuine information. After they die no one will. There is an international
organization specializing in folklore, CIOFF, of which I am a member. Its
first festival in Ukraine was titled Slobozhanshchyna (historic name for
part of Eastern Ukraine centered in Kharkiv - Ed.) Summer." Among
the festival's requirements is representation not by five countries but
by five continents, including Africa, the Americas, and islands. In return,
CIOFF is prepared to launch Ukrainian folk rites to the international orbit.
The Day: Trips to the islands and staging Oedipus must cost
a pretty penny. Do you still think that the state should foot the bill?
V. V.: At present, I have strong doubts that this has anything
to do with the Ministry of Culture or Cabinet. Vaplite, Vikna and other
groups existed in the 1930s independently of the state. The only thing
we need from the state is encouragement which is another way to say please,
don't hinder our work. After all, we do have Ukrainian patrons. There is
a firm, which has nothing to do with show business that offered me a gorgeous
project called Golden Gates of the Millennia. There is an open-air theater
under construction on the left bank, which will seat 2,000, with life-size
Golden Gates. In two hours tourists and guests from abroad will see everything
that took place in Ukraine, starting with the foundation of Kyiv: pagan
rites, princes, Cossacks. A boat will float at an altitude of 15 meters
and a 12 meter monster will walk around, its head moving whichever way...
The Day: Inflatable?
V. V.: Aluminum. It will also ride along Khreshchatyk to promote
the project. This offer is very precious to me, because it is much more
than staging a company's fifth anniversary or Light Industry Day. The idea
was conceived in Egypt. They staged The Arabian Nights amidst the
pyramids. Can you imagine? Actually, the show turned out to be rather amateurish,
so why not have a thousand and one Ukrainian nights here? Or maybe something
even more exciting.







