ORPHEUS UA

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This musical/multimedia performance was built upon the materials collected by Sashko Brama and Andrii Buchko in 2017 during a hiking expedition across Ukraine: from the Ukraine-EU border all the way to the front line in the East. The route ran through areas about which tourist guidebooks are silent, while the journey itself lasted seven months. It was an attempt to meet then Ukraine, which was undergoing painful formative processes of becoming after gaining independence and after the Revolution of Dignity, an attempt to meet the country face to face, to take its pulse, hear its thoughts, grasp its image and then reproduce it through an artistic expression.

Thus, the photos and videos gathered during the expedition, as well as the stories heard and diaries of the artists laid out the groundwork for the performance which combined video, electronic music, vocals and mechanized scenography.

The play’s dramaturgy is based on the myth about Orpheus who sets out on a journey through the kingdom of the dead to return his lover. An invocation of an universal mythological plot allows  to craft a multi-layer associative symbolic subtext, in which semantic relations between the Specific (historical, national) and the Universal, Endless arises. Along with the sociopolitical context, the authors also try to reveal the existential space of a person who is mounted into a certain cultural, social, political structure, but in fact does not actually belong there. That is why this person above all aims to answer the ontological questions about their being: who am I? what is my destiny?

The artists demonstrate with this piece the internal path of formation, while also externalizing it by routing through modern Ukraine. The country provides a crisis setting suitable for the stories of not only an individual person, but also of the whole society as a single organism. Its most painful junctures are reflected in the story of an ordinary person who attempts to walk the great path of Orpheus, the path of epiphany and purification through pain.

ORPHEUS UA is a reinterpretation of myth, a dramatic story about trauma and phantom pain on the verge of the personal (individual) and the national (collective). The story is told in the universal language of humanity –  music. It is directly related to the character of Orpheus who was a poet and a singer. The music, created by composer Timur Gogitidze, cannot be situated within any specific style, since it is a postmodern mix, the sounding of which ranges from experimental electronics to ethnic motifs, from dance beats and rap to modern opera.

Artistic director – Sashko Brama
Composer – Timur Gogitidze
Keyboards, playbacks, arrangements – Ira Lobanok
Vocals – Ivanka Shkvarok
Electric cello – Tina Rzhas
Electronic drums – Alyona Kovalenko
Performer – Oksana Cherkashina
Playwrights – Sashko Brama, Max Schumacher
Video – Andrii Buchko, Sashko Brama
Choreography – Nina Falkova
Costume designers – Olga Gontar, Petro Petrovskyi
Tailoring – Daryna Medulich
Costumes-related technical operations – Zhenya Shugaev, Nestor Lisovskyi
Sound engineer – Serhiy Svirzhskyi
Software for scenography – Oleksandr Ivanichev
Video programming – Yoann Trello
Video editing – Yoann Trello, Sashko Brama
Sound design – Iryna Lobanok
Analytical support – Andrii Mai, Roman Lozynskyi, Viktoria Brindza
PR – Iryna Zaloga, Svitlana Kolodiy, Valentin Pugachev
Bookkeeping – Tetyana Lezhanska
Legal Affairs – Yurii Helemey

The project was produced in cooperation with Post Theater (Berlin, Germany) with the support of the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation, Goethe-Institut Ukraine, Culture Bridges.

Part of the funding was raised through the Spilnokosht crowdfunding platform.