In the Ukrainian city of Dnipro, a block from the river, the Shevchenko Theatre building is almost palatial in its detail. An elaborate facade holds three gigantic panels sculpted in low relief, each depicting a key scene from classic Ukrainian plays. More than a venue, it is where a nation’s theatre history is written in stone.
Shortly after the Euromaidan protests in 2014, the actor Alina Chornodub performed in the Shevchenko Theatre’s production of The Forest Song, a 1918 fantasy play by the Ukrainian playwright Lesya Ukrainka. Chornodub played a mavka, a female spirit from Ukrainian folklore known for luring men to their deaths, though Ukrainka interpolated the myth with a new story of female sacrifice, rejection and, ultimately, transcendence.
“It’s an incredible story. When I first joined the Shevchenko, I dreamed of playing the role,” says Chornodub, who came to Ireland after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year. As Dnipro’s political establishment shifted after Euromaiden, replacing pro-Russian parties with politicians seeking ties with the European Union, Chornodub’s CV read as a sign of the changing tide.
After The Forest Song, she appeared in the theatre’s production of By the Time the Sun Rises, the Dew Will Devour the Eyes, a fin-de-siècle melodrama by Marko Kropyvnytskyi, presenting a cross-sectional portrait of eastern continental society at the end of the 19th century that’s not dissimilar from Anton Chekhov’s the Cherry Orchard, except where that play might invite sympathy for a fading tsarist era, Kropyvnytskyi’s play peers into that regime’s oppression of Ukraine.
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What happened in Dnipro in the 2010s seems prescient. The Shevchenko had long upheld a principle of performing all its plays in Ukrainian; then other theatres in the city began to join it in rejecting Russian-language performances – a conversion repeated across the country after Vladimir Putin ordered his “special military operation” there. “This was a very important step, and the fact that theatres switched to Ukrainian did not deter audiences. On the contrary, in my opinion, more people started coming to the theatres because they had a greater impact on strengthening Ukrainian national spirit,” Chornodub says through a translator.
The Shevchenko Theatre remains operational even as Ukrainian cultural sites are being targeted by the Russian army – as of last week, Unesco had verified damage to 255 sites. Destroyed structures include the beloved Railway Workers’ House of Science and Technology cultural centre in Lyman and, appallingly, Mariupol’s Drama Theatre, which had been turned into a bunker for vulnerable residents of the city.
Chornodub, who lives with a host family in Dublin, is giving drama classes for Ukrainian children. She’d also like to act here. “I’m trying to improve my English as quickly as possible.”
The choreographer Julia Artemenko spent a decade developing contemporary dance in Kherson, founding Insight Dance Studio as a hub for teaching many genres of dance. When she brought the Kherson choreographer Anton Safonov back from Kyiv, both of their dance troupes performed in a triple bill in one of the city’s libraries. “It was the first real evening of contemporary dance in Kherson,” says Artemenko, who now lives in Ennis, in Co Clare.
She recognises the importance of such artistic exchanges and worked hard to import performance models from outside Kherson, including a kind of outdoor, site-specific dance trail that reframes the relationships of the city’s inhabitants with their home. (None of her dance productions was hosted by Kherson’s purpose-built venues. “The academic theatre was impossible money to rent, but we didn’t have a need to go there, because it is very big. I think contemporary art is supposed to be more intimate,” she says.)
Among these promenade dances was Red Line, which takes its title from a Ukrainian pavement marking that separates pedestrian from commercial spaces. The production raised questions about Kherson’s urbanism and who the city is for: “Sometimes we see the red line move to let people sell more. We had a lot of this in Ukraine. Cities are not supposed to be like this, because there is already little space for people to go.”
Such productions are all the more miraculous considering they were often self-funded by Artemenko and dependent on ticket sales. “I didn’t feel supported from the government. We had opportunity to do what we did, but we had to figure it out on our own,” she says.
Dancers are imaginably sensitive to the way trauma inhabits the body. “In one moment something broke inside me,” she says, recalling the morning she was woken by an attack on the airport near her home. A week later Kherson was under Russian control.
In Ennis, Artemenko began taking up movement-based routines that keep the body together. She jogs in the mornings and goes to yoga classes. She connected with Laura Ailis, owner of Breakthrough Dance Studio, and now she is teaching again.
“For me it was important to work and do something,” Artemenko says, adding that she would like to learn more about the dance scenes in Limerick and Dublin and connect with other artists.
Masha Khaleeva, a Ukrainian actor, has been finding solace by walking her host family’s dogs to the Wicklow shore. Originally from the landlocked city of Kharkiv, she had never lived near the sea before arriving in Ireland last year.
Khaleeva spent nine years acting with Kharkiv’s award-winning Sorvantsy youth theatre – “It worked like a professional theatre, and we were treated like professionals,” she says – and performed in daring plays such as Flying Love, a tale of teenage limbo and depression by Robert Oreshnik. In Kharkiv, Sorvantsy Theatre no longer exists.
She had stepped away from theatre to focus on a career in marketing, but her connection to the medium has reignited in Ireland. “When the world burns, you understand what really matters to you,” she says. Before moving to Wicklow, she was living in Longford, where she assisted in productions at the Backstage Theatre, including Root, Luke Casserly and Shauna May Breen’s contemporary play, and Lúminaria, Fionnuala Gygax’s play for young audiences. “Every month or two I’ll try to involve myself in something,” she says.
Ireland is also now home to some aspiring Ukrainian performers. Veronika Shpiro and her family were forced to leave their home city of Kremenchuk after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “They left everything behind them. Even her pointe shoes had to be replaced when she came to us,” says Lindsay Ashe-Browne, artistic director of Irish National Youth Ballet, of which Veronika, who is 12, is now a member. She appeared in its production of The Nutcracker last December and has been rehearsing to appear in its staging this week of Frederick Ashton’s ballet Les Patineurs, or The Skaters, which is set on a frozen pond. “I find dancing on skates very fun,” says Veronika, who lives in Celbridge, in Co Kildare. She has been on scholarship with the company, thanks to a private donor. The grant ends this month; Ashe-Browne is hoping that a new funder will come forward.
A fellow young performer is Dana Sydorenko, who appeared in Dublin Youth Theatre’s Debut One Act Festival last month. Dana, who lives in Gormanstown, in Co Meath, says that her role – a worried teenager during the fallout from a serious incident at school – was useful for working through her own feelings of fear and unease. “At the end she says a monologue that is very close to me, and every word resonates in me.”
Dana is from Chernihiv, one of the first battlegrounds in the war when it came under siege by the Russian army. Stretches of the city have been destroyed by bombing. She used to act with an amateur drama company there, including in an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale The Snow Queen. She played its young heroine, Gerda. “I like her because she is kind, strong and knowledgeable about the ways of the world. Gerda never gives up and finds a way out of the hardest situation,” Dana says.
Such resilience now seems less a choice than a demand being made of all displaced Ukrainians. The story of the country’s theatre is written into the walls of the Shevchenko but that’s not the only place where it is inscribed. Masha Khaleeva misses her friends and colleagues from Kharkiv but remains hopeful. “We are all over the world, but there is still theatre in our minds.”
Irish National Youth Ballet’s quadruple bill of Paquita, Schubert Impromptu, Les Patineurs and An Choill is at the Helix Theatre, Dublin 9, on Thursday, May 18th, and Friday, May 19th
