Grownup Childhood

This is all the more strange since during the baroque period this purely urban entertainment was extremely popular, especially among the students and teachers of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. Well, there must be some justice diluted in time; this spectacular street art is getting a new lease on life, again from the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. Anatoly Petrov, artistic director of the Experimental Theater based at the Academy, is a true street theater fanatic. He not only stages performances and teaches Academy students but also organizers festivals. His first breakthrough was the Open Skies show staged in Kyiv and Alushta (in the Crimea), involving the Kyiv company, Lviv's Voskresinnia, and Krakow's famous KTO Company. While the street theater is only starting in Ukraine, in neighboring Western countries it is already in vogue. There are some 15 open air drama festivals in Poland. The fact that Kyiv's Experimental Theater is recognized there is evidenced by its invitation to the two most prestigious ones, Krakow's Feta and International. Feta is quite representative, kept according to the European standard (over 30 performances in four days). The Experimental Theater's Dream Carnival was practically the festival's closing number. The audience numbered at least 5,000 people standing in the street and watching from their windows. The carnival (seen in Ukraine several times) consisted of masked characters walking on stilts to the accompaniment of drums, complete with a concert and dancing (also on stilts). The Poles were enchanted. A combination of stab, virtuoso technique, and musical megahits drove the audience wild. The applause seemed to last longer than the performance.

However, any festival is primarily important in that it enable the participants to meet with colleagues from various countries. Gdansk had quite a few surprises in store. The French theater was in the form of a mobile butcher shop and a small orchestra, performing very funny sketches. The Australian balance-masters staged an exciting show astride tall flexible poles. The Spain's Jarja provided a staggering pyrotechnic number compared to which all the official fireworks on Khreshchatyk Street look like a bunch of children playing with firecrackers. There were both serious and cheerful drama groups. The Kyivans stood out from this menagerie with their inherently Slavic rigor and artistic staunchness; none of the theaters participating in both festivals could boast as large and well orchestrated group of stilt-dancers. Stilt-dancing is as spectacular as it is dangerous for the performers. In the West, health care has reached a level almost hazardous to the performing arts. In a word, the Ukrainian dancers' graceful self-sacrifice left the Polish audiences stunned with admiration.

The visit to Krakow was as risky, because the Experimental Theater planned to perform a brand-new show titled Marko Pekelny, based on seventeenth and eighteenth century Ukrainian burlesque poetry. It is a story about a Ukrainian Cossack daredevil who exculpates his sins by rescuing dead Cossacks' souls from the Devil himself. Petrov and the group staged it with an innate combination of irony and circus pomp. New costumes were designed and fireworks shoot out from the shoulders of grotesque characters. The music was borrowed from Kyiv theatrical composer Yuri Shevchenko's score for the ballet Katrusia mixed with Soviet dance hits. In Krakow, as in Gdansk, the Kyiv group found itself at the close of the festival. And again poetry translated into the language of masks and dance exploded the audience. In Lodz, during an unscheduled performance en route home, an extravagant theatergoer even tried to tear a pretty witch from the angry Marko's hands. Such a childishly straightforward ingenious response is only natural, say Anatoly Petrov, because the Experimental Theater has much to bring one back to one's childhood. The stilts, for example make the child's dream of being taller than everyone else come true. "All of us wanted to be high above when we were children," he adds. Also, a big noisy celebration with all the street taking part. In an exciting game one loses all sense of time or age. Young and old feel perfectly equal. In a European carnival Poland and Ukraine would feel the same. After all, it is much easier to step over frontiers on stilts.