Volodymyr KUCHYNSKY: “The main thing is that your experiment should not be an end in itself”
Why do spectators go to the theater today? Some do so to peek into someone else’s story on stage to distract themselves from their daily routine. Others want to see a fairy tale and a miracle, aspiring to feel the impulse of insight after this. It is this kind of a spectator that Volodymyr Kuchynsky, artistic director of the Lviv Les Kurbas Youth Theater, caters for tries to answer the eternal question – to be or not to be in a theatric space? And, to break out of the quagmire of provincialism, one should meditate together with the audience and, naturally, to experiment.
The Les Kurbas Theater positions itself as an experimental one…
“The theater in general is impossible without experiment. The main thing is that your experiment should not be an end in itself.”
But the spectator does not accept some experiments.
“I can see that, but the first and foremost precept for a theater, especially if it lays claim to being an intellectual, not just crowd-gathering, center, is that it should outpace the spectator. For this reason, some spectators come to see our productions several times if they are unable to fathom the depth of the concept at once. And this is only natural, for if everything is clear in the play, when actors have no secrets on stage, have no place to lead the spectator to, and proclaim copybook maxims over and over again, it is bad taste. In that case the show looks like a multicolored flicker that catches your eye but is senseless.”
“THERE WERE TWO GOOD TEACHERS IN MY LIFE”
What is it that draws audiences to the Kurbas Theater?
“When our theater was being established, there were about 200 stage companies in Ukraine – a sharp contrast to what we have now. So we had to self-assert and become best of the best by our own effort, for we received no funding from either the state or sponsors. The late 1980s was a very special time – everybody longed for changes and had their own plans for the future. And when these changes occurred at last in the 1990s, individuals began to search for their place in the world. I felt myself, above all, an ideologue rather than an actor or producer, for it was very important to choose a theater development strategy. This was by far the most important thing in what I was doing as artistic director, for as time goes by, the role of art changes, so different people go to the theater to see absolutely different things. At the time, the Kurbas Theater began to stage meditative plays in the Oriental spirit, such as Marko the Damned, The Noble Stork. We began to sing heirmoses and read apocrypha. I am now reflecting on combining the two styles. The theater has two wings – the actor goes from external things to himself and vice versa. The Kubas Theater may be said to have had three stages of development: the first rested on Western improvisation, the second on Eastern meditation, and the third, current one, on a combination of the two trends. In my view, the intellectual theater is one that balances between the objective and the subjective – when actors express the subjective manifestations of the heart and, at the same time, raise them to the objective, poetic, and sacral level.”
Can we say that the Les Kurbas Theater is nonconformist because it receives no support from the authorities?
“I wish we could. Naturally, nobody would reject being financially stable, but the price theater buffs have to pay for this cannot be measured by money alone. Yet theaters are essentially an extremely compromise-seeking territory, where partners must hear one another. After all, we work with humans, not stones.”
Which of these non-stone humans has made the deepest imprint on your life?
“The never-ending impression is that one genius hands me down to another. I’ve had two good teachers in my lifetime: the Russian theatrical producer and pedagogue Anatoly Vasilyev and the prominent figure of the Polish and international theatrical culture, experimenter and theoretician of theater, Jerzy Grotowski. In my view, the two men are very close as geniuses. Clearly, there is a difference in stylistics. Grotowski and Vasilyev are by and large an Eastern and a Western personality, respectively. Grotowski reached his peak in the 1970s-1980s, when there was martial law in Poland and he went to Italy to set up a ‘laboratory theater.’ Vasilyev flourished in the late 1980s-early 1990s, when he was given a theater at last. His theater had in fact begun to function just two or three days before the Kurbas Theater. I was then a third-year student. I once came late for an exam because of being engaged in a play production, and he bore a grudge against me for half a month. I am enormously glad to have always come across the people who apply diverse methods and have a special intellectual level of interpreting and feeling the art they are engaged in. And such people always find themselves in each other’s informational field. To confirm this, I can tell you about a concrete case. Grotowski’s center was once doing one project with the Kurbas Theater and another with Vasilyev on the same territory. Only a wall partitioned our rehearsals. I can remember well that Vasilyev staged Chekhov.”
“THEATERS ARE SYNTHETIC BRIDGEHEADS FOR THE TRANSORMATION OF REALITY”
In his well-known treatise On the Way to Poor Theater, Grotowski focuses on the actor and the spectator and places man in the center, thus reducing the role of music, literature, and painting in the theater. And what does the Kurbas Theater emphasize in its productions?
“In all theaters, man comes to the foreground – just in different ways – because the theater has been about people since the time when Helena Blavatsky and English aristocrats were doing a project aimed at raising child prodigies so that one of them might become the world’s messiah. The anthropological theater was conceived by Steiner, and Grotowski was his follower in the contest of the entire Western theater. By contrast, owing to Stanislavsky, the Russian theater focused on emotional experience, which is still in vogue in that country’s theatrical circles.”
Conversely, performance art is being increasingly popularized in the West. What is your attitude to this phenomenon of today?
“For me, performance art is a conversation with the spectator by means of objective spatial facts. Performance art is always a test for provincialism for any theater. This art presupposes simple actions that can be understood equally well in a village, in Lviv, and in Paris – the point is how the spectator will treat them. The theater always belongs to a certain society, while performance art is a free theatrical rolling stone.”
And what about a synthesis of theater, cinema techniques, and musical insets?
“It is an effort to keep up with the times. But it is not the question of one genre superseding another – while cinema is more mobile, theater is more multidimensional. This does not mean that theater has nothing to learn from cinema, especially from high-quality art house movies, so we were among the first to set up a cine club in the theater premises. Besides, we use the screen in our stage productions. In the 1990s, many theaters retreated into themselves, forgetting that they were synthetic bridgeheads for the transformation of reality and that interaction of various genres of art was typical of them. But just a decade later, theater directors began to work openly, breaking down these obstacles, meeting various people, establishing contacts, and making joint efforts. It was a breathtaking carnival of sorts, a breath of freedom. Now all is quiet and, unfortunately, this has even caused some stagnation. What should be united are not only different arts, but also different theaters and troupes. In the present-day Lviv, there is a slight feeling of alienation among theaters. Yet the Kurbas Theater used to receive a lot of guests.”
Which ones?
“We would hold all kinds of theatrical festivals. On our initiative, this place was visited by theatrical troupes from Denmark, song and plastique companies from Sweden, and the Americans who later discovered Jerzy Grotowski for the overseas world. We recently received the Kurds and are planning to see the Poles, etc. Naturally, we have also entertained famous Ukrainian guests, such as Serhii Babkin and the group Dakha-Brakha, our longtime friends.”
“THE BEST THING IS WHEN ONE CAN UNDERSTAND ANOTHER WITHOUT WORDS”
And what foreign theatrical festivals has the Kurbas Theater attended?
“Earlier, I just loved foreign tours because the Ukrainian language was not understood abroad. The whole verbal level practically disappears and all the plot-related tricks that can buy the spectators are effaced, leaving only the art of acting intact. It is the best thing when one can understand another without words. For there are many lies on the verbal level, while the body language, plastique, and mimicry will never lie. I am pleased to remember doing Plato in Macedonia, Stus in the UK and Poland, and Skovoroda and Dostoevsky in the US. At first glance, it is a utopia for a Ukrainian theater to make money on Broadway. But we did it. Our audience consisted of young people who wore multicolored hair and body piercing jewelry and had visited a live exhibition shortly before, where they drank wine and brawled. I was in despair before the show, but the audience surprised us. It was the best Skovoroda production we had ever played – when you make some mini-gesture and the audience takes it as a grandiose event. Russian theater companies are a different thing. They cannot do without shocking behavior, sort of a fuss, in their shows. It is quite normal for them and interesting for Europe, but I can’t imagine this accepted somewhere in the East, say, in India.”
Do foreigners no longer confuse the Ukrainian and Russian theatrical milieus?
“All depends on who you deal with. Naturally, it is not the early 1990s, when you had to explain who you were. Still, the foreign spectator cannot form an integrated image of the Ukrainian theatrical milieu because the latter is inhomogeneous. A Kharkiv theater company differs from one in Kyiv and, the more so, one in Lviv. But it is gratifying that our productions help foreigners find answers to the question whether or not Ukrainian culture exists as a whole. Moreover, Ukrainian legends are sometimes better known abroad than in the homeland. Regrettably, to keep a really high-quality artwork from rotting away at this country’s warehouses, we have to export it. International fame undoubtedly means recognition and high standards for any theater. It is not an individual or a group that is at a loss, it is our society that loses. Our eyes are tightly shut, and it is high time we opened them at least a little – otherwise we will oversleep not only the morning, but also the midday.”
The Day’s FACT FILE
Volodymyr Kuchynsky is a Ukrainian theater producer, Merited Figure of Arts of Ukraine (1994), winner of the Vasyl Stus and Les Kurbas literature and art prizes (1989 and 2000, respectively), winner of the National Taras Shevchenko Prize (2006).
Since 1988, he has been artistic director of the Lviv Les Kurbas Youth Theater which he founded together with Oleh Drach and Tetiana Kaspruk.
In 1995 an international conference at the Les Kurbas Center pronounced Kuchynsky’s theater the best in Ukraine.
The theater has been taking part and winning prizes, including a grand prix, at prestigious international festivals in Ukraine, Russia, Poland (where it cooperated with the Gardzienice Theater), Italy, and the US.
