Correcting Mistakes

On October 10, Kyiv theater-goers had a chance to view the results of a ten-day masters’ class taught by actor and director Hryhory Hladiy at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. The class was conducted under the auspices of the Kurbas Center.

A clean-cut, pedigreed, and incredibly talented superman and super-professional was inspirationally practicing shamanism on a group of touchingly helplessness interns (incidentally, among them were some well-known actors and directors from Kyiv and Lviv, who were never announced to the audience). Under the guru’s temperamental direction, the students worked to imitate the ecstasy of energetic resonance. However, the audience, rather diverse but by no means accidental, was engaging in an imitation of aesthetic resonance. Too bad for them! The purely professional training based on the Grotovsky system and Hladiy’s own methods does not actually appeal to the sense of beauty and does not envision any standing ovations or exalted reaction in the finale of an open improvisation. It is not a theater of aesthetic prestige; it is rather, if you will, an anatomical theater that uncovers the physiology of acting and prepares its body’s spiritual capabilities.

For some reason, this valuable, albeit modest, treat for professionals starved for laboratory art was presented by the organizers with ambitious intentions and the orgasmic delight of the national revival.

A cult member of the advanced theatrical community of the 1980s, Hladiy has been a rare but welcome guest in his homeland over the last fifteen years. In his time, the legend of the disfavored Staunch Prince in the then Youth and now Young Theater gave him an aura of aesthetic dissidence in the eyes of his fans. By becoming a prophet in his homeland and then leaving it (prophets do not survive here), he doomed both himself and us. His fame first as a student and then as a star of Moscow master Anatoly Vasiliev’s troupe, coupled with his own successful theatrical activity in a very remote foreign land must be more than enough to impress the poor provincial imagination, mustn’t it?

In fact, Hryhory Hladiy, commonly believed to be flourishing in the West, is related to contemporary Ukrainian culture as much as, let’s say, Hercules is related to a plane crash in Thessaloniki.

Valery Bilchenko, pushed out of Ukraine by pervasive squalor and stupidity, also recently came to Kyiv from Germany, where he now lives. He is, by the way, a student of Vasiliev’s as well. An experimental theater he created is still trying to stay afloat at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, although Bilchenko has emigrated rather recently and has so far been teaching and directing in Berlin without claiming the status of a missionary.

Another German resident, Mark Nestantiner, visited Kyiv a couple of weeks ago. Incidentally, he is the one who staged the very Staunch Prince that earned Hladiy such a stable reputation as a disfavored innovator. Nestantiner’s visit was marked with a more than modest presentation of the Khreshchatyk literary and artistic magazine (the last bulwark of Russian-speaking writers in Western and Eastern Europe), published by the Serhiy Paradzhanov Charitable Fund. The fund, headed by Nestantiner, has neither office space nor money in Ukraine and implements its projects mostly on the donations of enthusiastic emigrants.

Curiously enough, Hladiy did not even mention Nestantiner in his recent interview for the Itogi magazine (later reprinted in Kievskie Vedomosti), in which he gave a rather lengthy retrospective account of The Staunch Prince. Since the start of this season, Mark Nestantiner has been directing a theatrical school in Munich and is not very likely to humor the generous homeland with free entertainment in the immediate future.

In reality, the present thirty- and forty-something generation, which in general has not distinguished itself in the contemporary theater (and not only theater), while acquiring artistic maturity in the grinding machine of changing epochs, could also play out a chess game with the black and white cult figures of their artistic adolescence. It could also create an anthology of post-stagnation Ukraine’s legends and myths, in which every character would be at least a hero, if not a god.

Yet, the majority of those heroes are no longer at the top of our shaky Olympus, which likes to host its prodigal sons coming back on white horses in a much too exalted way.