FALL ON PLUTO

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We created this play about elderliness and loneliness based on the stories of the people residing in one of Lviv’s retirement home. During a year the play’s authors have been visiting this institution, closely interacted with elderly people and conversed with them regarding their life experiences. These encounters allowed the group of young artists to see what it is like to be a lonely person, left out on the periphery of life. The play was built upon the stories and voices of 5 retirement home residents: Viacheslav, Henya, Maryna,  Mykhailyna, Myroslava.

The elderly are one of the biggest socially vulnerable and insecure groups of the Ukrainian population. Productivity-oriented everyday routines and mass culture supplanted the psychological and existential problems in the public discourse. Elderliness nowadays stands for prejudices, disregard, discrimination, weak social security, plunging income and worse of all defenselessnesses and helplessness. Each year this problem becomes more and more relevant, because the Ukrainian aging rate rises. Ukraine is already among the top-30 eldest countries based on the number of people older than 60. The share of this group in the population increases every year.

The artists aimed to create a space for the quiet voices of the elderly and to shed light onto the problem of their isolation. Therefore, the artists searched for a form that would allow to show elderliness on stage. The play starred young actors, thus both the so-called psychological theater, where actors would play roles, and the aesthetics of the classical documentary theater (verbatim) have been rendered unusable for an artistic solution. An actor could not be a reliable guide, given that a young person cannot communicate the life experiences which have been gathered all the way up to elderliness. Other, more convincing forms of communications were to be found which would allow the audience to draw nearer to the experiences of the characters. That is how the idea to utilize retirement home residents’ voice recordings came into being. The voice is an authentic vehicle for human experience and emotions. A “body” was needed as well, that is, a compelling visual image. The dolls have been created according to the prototypes of five retirement home residents. The production of the play occurred at an intersection of various artistic practices and the novel technologies. It was not only the artists who were involved in the implementation of the artistic scheme, but also experts in IT. Audio systems, mounted in dolls, and software to control the retirement home residents’ audio recordings remotely were developed specifically for the play in cooperation with a programmer and an electrical engineer. 

During 2019 the project team performed the play in small towns and villages as a response to the problem of culture being centralized in big cities. The performances took place in Polonne (Khmelnytskyi region), Chortkiv (Ternopil region), Novy Yarychiv (Lviv region), Mukachevo and Nyzhne Selyshche (Zakarpattia region). Podvirne (Chernivtsi region), Nemishaeve (Kyiv region), Sylets (Lviv region), Ivano-Frankove (Lviv region), Velyka Kamianka (Ivano-Frankivsk region), Mykolaiv (Lviv region).

The play has been adapted to different spaces: a nightclub, a flat roof of a residential building, an abandoned hangar. After the performances took place, discussions with the audience happened.

Concept, dramaturgy, implementation – Sashko Brama jointly with Maria Bakalo and Andre Erlen (Germany)
Dolls – Oksana Rossol, Oleksandr Serhienko
Audio design – Timur Gogitidze

Sound recording – Faust
Light – Volodymyr Fanta
Programming – Dmytro Makara
Electrical engineering – Serhiy Chervyn
Analytical support – Victoria Brindza
Photos – Maryana Klochko
Financial manager – Tetyana Lezhanska

At different periods the following male and female performers took part in the performance: Andrii Buchko, Anastasiia Lisovska, Yuriy Shorobura, Valeriya Petruk, Marichka Kmit, Margaryta Pidluzhna, Yuriy Sulyk, Marko Svizhynskyi, Yuliia Smetanska, Svitlana Lysovska, Isabel Merkulova, Olha Mykhailiuk, Danylo Khromov, Anna Kovtunenko, Kseniia Arnaut, Nadiya Kalyniuk, Solomiya Dudych, Viktor Dykiy, Mykhailo Ponzel, Andriy Petruk.

Thanks to Alla Novikova for master classes on puppet manipulation.

Goethe-Institut, the British Council, Lviv City Council supported the project.

Part of the funds were raised through the Spilnokosht crowdfunding platform.

The play was performed at DESANT UA (Warsaw, Poland), DEMOLUDY (Olsztyn, Poland), Theatertreffen-Stückemarkt (Berlin, Germany), Ukrainian showcase within the international theater conference IETM (Kyiv), URBÄNG (Cologne, Germany), Ukrainian Week in Gdansk IV (Gdansk, Poland).