Vasyl VOVKUN: "SOME POLITICIANS SUFFER THE COMPLEX OF STATELESSNESS"

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.