" Kharkiv! Kharkiv!" at the Polish Theatre
On 22 March, the Polish Theatre in Warsaw will present the premiere performance of the musical play " Kharkiv! Kharkiv!", of which the Mieroszewski Centre is an official partner.
"'Kharkiv! Kharkiv!", based on a play by Serhiy Zhadan, takes us back to the time of the avant-garde Berezil theatre and its founder, director and reformer, Les Kurbas, who carried out his artistic activity in Kharkiv between 1925 and 1933. The play - in musical form - tells the story of the conflicts between the city and the theatre, the principal of the theatre and the director, the director and the audience or even the director and the actors, making the story of Kurbas a metaphor for the experience of every artist and, more broadly, the struggle for ideals.
Kharkiv became the birthplace of the Ukrainian avant-garde in the 1920s, with prominent artists living and working there. Most of them fell victim to the Stalinist purge in the 1930s, and their work, which the Soviet authorities considered inappropriate, was erased for decades to come.
Olexandr Zenon Kurbas, the main character of the play, was a director and actor who founded the Berezil theatre in 1922, seeking new forms of expression for Ukrainian drama. His life tragically ended in 1937 when he was murdered in a mass execution in the forests of Sandarmoch. You can read more about the history of Sandarmoch, as a place that symbolically concentrates the general history of the memory of the Great Terror, in a publication co-published by the Mieroszewski Centre by Irina Flige.
We invite you to the Polish Theatre to discover the depth of Ukrainian history and culture through a stage adaptation, and to experience how art can become a tool in the struggle for freedom and truth.
- Text: Serhiy Zhadan
- Translation: Adam Pomorski
- Directed by: Svitlana Oleshko
- Set and costume design: Katarzyna Zawistowska
- Music: Noam Zylberberg
- Lighting: Paweł Śmiałek Vocal tutoring: Katarzyna Winiarska
- Choreography: Maria Lozova
- Characterisation (cinematography): Olena Homutetska
- Realization of recordings: Piotr Kulakowski - Fast Frame Kharkiv! Kharkov!
- Cast: Dorota Bzdyla, Jakub Kordas Michał Kurek, Modest Ruciński
fot. Karolina Jóźwiak
