Hohol-Fest: spring games within cold walls

The distinguishing feature of the Hohol-Fest is its multifaceted variety, which is enabled by the space where the event is taking place: the Mystetskyi Arsenal Art Center on Ivan Mazepa Street. Like last year, the main hall is occupied by the exhibit. At the end of this suite of rooms there are theater and concert areas partitioned from each other. The side hall has a chamber stage, and there is another exhibit and a rock stage in the basement.

This year’s program is packed with events, including daily master classes taught by artists, plays, and other types of live performances. Several cinema evenings are scheduled thanks to Kyiv’s Vidkryta Nich and Molodist film festivals.

The exhibit is called “Cartel of Curators: Mystification,” uniting 12 individual mini-exhibits organized by more or less well-known galleries or curators. What is important is that regional artists are also represented here: the exhibit “Born in Ukraine,” organized by the Ukrainian Association of Graphic Designers (Kharkiv) is particularly interesting. It is represented by posters depicting those whom it is now fashionable to call “great Ukrainians”: Anna Akhmatova, Casimir Malevich, Les Kurbas, Mykola Hohol, David Burliuk, and Alexander Archipenko. Unlike television fare, which is predigested and diluted, the works of these Kharkiv-based artists are inclusive, content-heavy, and full of incisive forms through which they present the images of various famous Ukrainians.

The finest works at the exhibit, presented by Kyiv’s new Bottega Gallery (curator: Maryna Shcherbenko) are united under the title “The Creation of the World,” featuring works from the Kyiv painter Matvii Vaisberg’s 1999 series “Seven Days.” The large hieroglyphic canvases are inspired by motifs from the Old Testament, but they do not reflect the creation of the Biblical cosmos so much as the demiurge of the artistic world. Each element of this impressive universe, which is represented by a particular sign, is part of a more complex and deep structure, which is as self-sufficient as it is open to all interpretations. These works feature some of the colors of the primary elements: black, blue, and gold.

Of those artists whose works are on display at the Underground Exhibit in the basement, the works of Roman Minin are the most memorable. He paints canvases featuring the life of miners in a poster-like manner reminiscent of monumental paintings of Soviet times. But his works do not look like an exercise in social art irony or opportunism because in these somewhat naive canvasses one can feel the artist’s sincerity, which is crucial to creating art that is truly social.

The theatrical component predominates in the festival program. Hohol-Fest was launched by a performance by the Dakh Studio, and the central event of the entire theatrical concert part was the play The Wet Wedding staged by the Russian AXE Engineering Theater from St. Petersburg. All the plots, implements, and set designs are created by two engineer artists, Maksim Isaiev and Pavel Semchenko. Wearing long alchemists’ lab coats and comic eyeglasses and caps, they perform magic with ordinary objects and liquids in a most unexpected way. Dry leaves, sand, soil, wood, fire, acetone, wine, water, paste, ropes, shovels, brooms, items of furniture, buckets, and fanciful structures, like a huge cube, and plenty of other details become microelements in the creation of the drama, at the core of which is the eternal story that develops between a man and a woman.

The wonderful actors Aleksei Merkushev and Ilona Markarova are the main characters in this play. Thanks to their work amidst all this machinery, the core content appears, and water and fire become the elements of passion. Despite the total absence of spoken words during the performance, the authors of the play manage to bring balance to the scenic special effects and plot, narrate the dramatic story, and impress the audience. The other theater companies that performed during the first week of Hohol-Fest did not succeed in achieving such a unity of form and content.

The festival will last for nearly two weeks. Among the most important events is a concert performance by Moscow’s OPUS POSTH academic avant-garde ensemble (May 15) conducted by violinist Tatiana Grindenko (Hrindenko), a concert lecture by Grindenko’s husband, the famous Russian composer Vladimir Martynov (May 16), a concert program of old Ukrainian melodies called Uchta (May 18; performed by the Lviv-based Les Kurbas Academic Theater), and an evening devoted to the Ukrainian knightly epos, which will take place on May 20 under the direction of Oleh Skrypka and with the participation of Taras Kompanichenko, Taras Chubai, and the Khoreia Kozatska and Zorianyi Korsar ensembles.

The ethnic theme continues on May 21 with a soiree of ethnic music and land art called Sheshory, featuring Drevo, a group that performs authentic folksongs, the ethnic-chaos band DakhaBrakha (Kyiv), and the Anchiskhati Choir (Tbilisi). Jazz-lovers will enjoy the performance of the well- known St. Petersburg trio Haivoronsky-Kondakov-Volkov (May 18). The Kyiv-based pianist Yevhen Hromov will give a concert of works from his sophisticated piano repertoire. His performance is dedicated to Richard Wagner’s 125th death anniversary and Anton von Webern’s 125th birth anniversary. On May 22 Hromov will take part in a performance featuring the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Visitors to the Hohol-Fest will enjoy the surrealistic comedy Night Symphony, performed by Odesa’s Masky comedy troupe (May 24), as well as the special interpretation by Moscow’s Sound-Drama Studio (May 12) of Hohol’s Evenings on a Farm near Dykanka. It is hoped that all these performances will be exciting enough to make the audience forget about the grave-like chill inside the Arsenal, which is unpleasant to the performers and audience mem bers. This question should be addressed not to the organizers but rather to those who turned the building of the “Ukrainian Louvre” into a cheap showcase.

It is clear that the Hohol-Fest has found a niche for itself in the yearly spring festival, which became vacant after the collapse of the theatrical forums Art March and Kyiv in May. We hope the performances at the Arsenal will enjoy a better fate.