Kyiv hosts a drama festival for the physically challenged

Art therapy was the ultimate goal of the Sun Wave International Drama Festival that ended last Saturday in Kyiv. It was held under the auspices of the Ukraine for Children National Fund as part of the EU Council program, which has declared 2003 the Year of the Disabled in European Countries. The festival drew theatrical troupes from Belarus, Lithuania, Russia, and Poland. Ukraine was represented by troupes from Kyiv, Lviv, Kharkiv, Lutsk, and Uzhhorod. In all, fifteen plays were staged at the Kyiv Academic Theater of the Young Viewer in Lypky. A jury of experts summed up the results of the festival and put forward its proposals at a workshop the following day.

There is no denying that we are accustomed to the fact that art must above all bring esthetic pleasure, and film and theater actors must be physical beauty incarnate. Meanwhile, an unprepared viewer might find it psychologically difficult to watch a performance by physically challenged children on crutches and in wheelchairs. Experts claim, however, that when it comes to the rehabilitation of disabled children there is nothing like theater. Two opinions have been voiced on this issue: either it is art for art’s sake, where the physically challenged can show their talent on a par with healthy individuals, or this is all about removing restraints and overcoming inhibitions. In particular, Volodymyr Fedorov, theater director and docent of the Stage Direction Faculty of the Kyiv National University of Culture and Arts, believes that, aside from developing thinking, memory, and speech, the performing arts help physically challenged children to develop and discover life through acting. “While onstage such children as if exist in a different vertical dimension, where they forget about the present and past. Then you don’t notice that someone is limping or mispronouncing words.” The main thing in such therapy is to find a part that would completely match the physiological and psychological capabilities of the child in question, so that only those who are not fit for acting at all would not go onstage and displease the audience.

Within this context, the report by Natalia Oralova, theatrical composer and art director of the Moscow-based Mirt theater, was very telling. At the festival she staged a short play based on Marina Tsvetayeva’s Psyche or Monologs from the Makeup Room. Notably, Ms. Oralova wrote the musical score and did the staging herself. In this play, a completely healthy professional actress is onstage together with a blind girl who sings beautifully. “For me a moment of integration is when a talented disabled person works on a par with a professional actor and pleases the audience. To conceal deficiencies means integration,” she believes.

Natalia works at a boarding school for children suffering from cerebral palsy. But her troupe of fifteen actors also includes autistic children and those suffering from the Down syndrome. Ms. Oralova says that she works with all children without exception, since they are more open for acting: “In one of the winter plays, in which the children were improvising, even an autistic boy understood everything correctly and acted as a snow mound, covering himself with a blanket.” Meanwhile, adults are not always eager to act, because our society expects the physically challenged to work as computer operators, mathematicians, and so forth: “I sometimes meet talented people in the street. For example, I met one young man in the subway, got him interested in acting, and now he is in love with theater. It transpired that he is a creative person. He writes plays himself and is quite handsome.” According to Ms. Oralova, the novelty is in the search for some new forms of drama, unusual eurhythmics, and expressive means: “My goal is to create in a play a most vivid combination of talented actors and find some new unusual dramatic solution.” Dramatic art has such therapeutic properties, because it combines in itself almost all kinds of art. Ms. Oralova’s method is based on eurhythmics. In her view, eurhythmics can be used to correct the limp of a boy suffering from cerebral palsy. Feeling the rhythm, he will move freely and easily. According to her, “Precisely this means integration of a disabled person into the society, when the emphasis is on the inner creative reserves of a person and not on his or her flaws.”