National Circus of Ukraine opens 125th jubilee season
The Day ’s reporters saw a preview of the new program somewhat grandiloquently called “The Road of Courage and Inspiration” on the eve of its opening. The preview, more precisely, dress rehearsal, is what everybody at the circus calls a madhouse. After watching countless stops and retakes, one takes a different, milder view of all the mistakes made by acrobats, flaws in the chorus line, or the clown’s jokes that are not always funny. The circus makes one sentimental, especially if one has visited it for as long as one can remember, recalling the time one came with one’s parents and now taking one’s own children. There is that raccoon making his debut, still a bit awkward (his trainer Liudmyla Shevchenko has her doubts: “Maybe it’s too early to put him on stage.”), yet you see in the funny creature a born actor. Or the troublesome dog Bassie acting as a crocodile. In your eyes she is something like a Hollywood star. I asked Liudmyla Shevchenko what was really new in the new program and how different it would be from the previous one. She replied without any false modesty, “There’s nothing new, except that the Shevchenkos are back in town. That’s about all.”
On dress rehearsal day Liudmyla and Volodymyr Shevchenko had just returned from Briansk. They had been delayed by customs, as they had their animals, cages, and other equipment. Over the past several years the star animal-training couple has worked in Russia. Now they are back home in Kyiv, most likely to stay, for Volodymyr has been appointed Artistic Director of the National Circus of Ukraine. Formally, their return to Kyiv has been decided, but certain problems still remain, specifically with regard to their animals. “We still have to buy out the tigers and horses, which are the property of a Russian company. As for the lions and smaller animals, we already own them,” says Liudmyla. By smaller animals she understands her cast ranging from the peccary Mottie (she was given her as a present while still in Kyiv and her pug snout is characteristic of the domestic species, so Mottie’s having it is anyone’s guess) to laboratory rats to monkeys to porcupines to ponies to a fox to hares and pigeons. They all appear in the first part of the program.
The second part boasts the Shevchenkos’ specialty numbers: “Tame Tigers” and “Tigers and Horsemen.” Not new, but well rehearsed and time-tested. Young mothers and fathers will have a chance to watch a performance they admired as children.
