Volume 11 - Issue 53
/ May 2022
155
https:// www.amazoniainvestiga.info ISSN 2322 - 6307
DOI: https://doi.org/10.34069/AI/2022.53.05.15
How to Cite:
Sovhyra, T., Tatarenko, M., Kasianenko, A., Skrypnyk, Y., & Belymenko, L. (2022). Avant-gardism in the work of director Andrii
Zholdak: Ukrainian and global context. Amazonia Investiga, 11(53), 155-165. https://doi.org/10.34069/AI/2022.53.05.15
Avant-gardism in the work of director Andrii Zholdak: Ukrainian and
global context
El vanguardismo en la obra del director AndriiZholdak: Contexto ucraniano y mundial
Received: April 18, 2022 Accepted: May 20, 2022
Written by:
Tetiana Sovhyra69
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7023-5361
Maryna Tatarenko70
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6838-3560
Andrii Kasianenko71
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6085-2190
Yevheniia Skrypnyk72
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0481-9147
Liliana Belymenko73
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7323-9528
Abstract
The article deals with the essence of avant-
gardism in art (theater, cinema, music). The
study aims to analyze the avant-garde techniques
in dramatic productions directed by A. Zholdak.
The representatives of the avant-garde direction
in the works of different countries of the world
are marked and the historical aspect of the
emergence of avant-gardism in theatrical art is
briefly outlined. The main life stages of
Zholdak's formation as a creative unit are
elaborated on the basis. Noted individual features
and ways of presenting interpreted performances,
including the integration of political issues in the
content of the work, the play on the contrasts, the
emphasis on the role and meaning of the
theatrical space, dynamism. The research
methodology is based on the principles of
objectivity, historicism, multifactoriality,
systematicity, complexity, development, and
pluralism. Examples of the main controversial
productions of classical plays in the
interpretation of the famous director
AndriiZholdak are given. Also described are the
attitudes of the public in different European
69
PhD in Art, Assistant professor Department of Variety Direction and Mass Holidays Faculty of Theatre, Cinema and Variety Art
Kyiv National University of Culture and Arts, Kyiv, Ukraine.
70
Candidate of Pedagogical Sciences Assistant Professor Department of Directing and Acting Skills, Faculty of Theater, Cinema and
Variety Art, Kyiv National University of Culture and Arts, Kyiv, Ukrainе.
71
Teacher Department of Variety Direction and Mass Holidays Faculty of Theatre, Cinema and Variety Art Kyiv National University
of Culture and Arts, Kyiv, Ukrainе.
72
Assistant Department of Directing and Acting Skills, Faculty of Theater, Cinema and Variety Art, Kyiv National University of
Culture and Arts. Kyiv, Ukraine.
73
Teacher Department of Variety Direction and Mass Holidays, Faculty of Theatre, Cinema and Variety Art, Kyiv National University
of Culture and Arts, Kyiv, Ukrainе.
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countries, including Ukraine, to the work of
AndriiZholdak as an innovator and avant-garde
artist. The peculiarities of the audience's
perception of AndriiZholdak's productions in
different European countries are indicated.
Keywords: avant-gardism, theater, art, director,
decree.
Introduction
The theatrical avant-garde in Ukraine is a
complex of innovative artistic trends, functioning
in parallel with traditional, realistic trends. To
cover the theoretical foundations and practical
achievements of theatrical modernism and avant-
garde in Ukraine is a complex and difficult task.
It is important in such research to choose the
appropriate direction of research problems of
modernist and avant-garde art. Consideration of
the theatrical modernism in Ukraine exactly
through the prism of proto-expressionist search is
weighty, productive, and justified from the
research and analytical point of view. In proto-
expressionism, the totality of worldview
postulates, quite distant from positivism and, to a
certain extent, close to naturalistic and realistic
specific art forms, such as psychodrama or “new
drama” in drama, quite thoroughly demonstrate
the transitional nature of this artistic current. It
was proto-expressionism, given its artistic
moderate manifestations but too epathetic
content, which prepared the ground for the
formation of expressionism and futurism in
Ukraine, thanks to whose radicalism the
theatrical avant-garde finally established itself.
Theatrical avant-gardism refers to the “left”
(non-realistic) currents of European art, based on
an innovative philosophical and aesthetic, and
political platform. A set of different currents of
avant-gardism were reflected in the process of
the art of Western Europe, Latin America, and
the United States, but were distinguished by the
unique specificity in each region.
The first manifestations of avant-gardism in
Ukrainian art took place in the 1910s (a traveling
exhibition of works by brothers V. and
D. Burliuk, N. Honcharova, M. Larionov in
Odesa, Kyiv, Kherson and Mykolaiv,
1910-1911; later - canvases by Exter, cubic
sculptures of O. Arkhypenko, neovizantism of
boychukists, the surrealism of Lviv association
Artes, in particular M. Andriienko-Nechytailo,
etc.). Signs of avant-gardism were characteristic
of the Berezil Theater. Not all styles fully
coincided with this direction, some of them could
exist within both avant-gardism and modernism,
in particular expressionism or surrealism. It was
in this theater that the famous contemporary
Ukrainian avant-garde director Andrii Zholdak
began his career.
Ukrainian theatrical art is going through a period
of active formation and development. This
blossoming is connected not only with the
emergence of new, young acting talents, but also
the improvement of educational training in
directing, producing of stage art, analysis of
touring activities, and improving the practical
skills of costume designers. In 2022 various
personnel preparation for work in the theater is
realized by 19 Ukrainian high schools, where
Kyiv National I. K. Karpenko-Kary Theatre,
Cinema and Television University, Kyiv
National University of Culture and Arts, Ivan
Franko National University of Lviv, and others
are considered to be the most authoritative.
Not the least role in the intensification of this
segment is played by globalization, migration
processes, professional rotation with foreign
specialists, and activation of the national and
foreign union of theatrical workers. Exchange of
cultural heritage, a real possibility to broadcast
national performances out of the territory of
Ukraine, to adopt and accumulate the best
foreign experience, all this makes a quintessence
of possibilities and reflects the regularity of the
theatrical art of the XXI century Ukraine is rich
in artists, who develop their creative activity on
our territory as well as beyond its borders. One
of such outstanding contemporary theater
directors is Andrii Valeriiovych Zholdak, who
has been living and creating in Germany since
2006. About the creative achievements of the
artist speak, as a rule, through the strips of the
media, and the number of scientific works, in
which as a subject of research are the features of
his individual style and manifestation in
theatrical productions - not much, leaves the
contribution of A. Zholdak in the development of
theater without attention. Accordingly, the
purpose of the following study is to analyze the
Sovhyra, T., Tatarenko, M., Kasianenko, A., Skrypnyk, Y., & Belymenko, L. / Volume 11 - Issue 53: 155-165 / May, 2022
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avant-garde techniques in the dramatic
productions of A. Zholdak's directing.
The purpose of the article is:
▪ analysis of the work of Andrii Zholdak as an
avant-garde innovator in the Ukrainian and
world context;
▪ defining the influence of avant-garde
productions by Andrii Zholdak on the
modern audience in Ukraine and the world;
▪ comparing the historical development of
avant-garde theater on the consciousness of
society.
Theoretical Framework or Literature Review
Theater avant-gardism was founded by the
French avant-gardist Alfred Jarry, author of King
Ubu, and Eugène Ionesco, author of the drama
The Bald Singer; the Irish-British Samuel
Beckett, author of the play Waiting for Godot;
the British Martin Ess Theater of Absurdity
(Grinyshyna et al., 2021); the history of Polish
avant-garde was examined in his works by Fazan
et al. (2021), the Romanian avant-garde
playwright Eugene Ionesco (Turoiu et al., 2019,
p. 281). Botsman (2022), and Faulina (2021)
wrote about the artist's creative path, having
worldwide recognition, does not lose ties with
Ukraine. The works of Condee (2002), Taylor
(2018) revealed in detail the concepts and
principles of actors' interaction in the theatrical
space.
Methodology
Prepare the methodology of the paper defining
the essence of avant-gardism as an innovative
current in contemporary art. In the process of
working on the article, primarily the comparative
method was used. During the study and
processing of materials, the historical, systemic
and logical-legal methods were also used.
In the study we used the following research
methods:
▪ analytical - review and comprehension of
literary sources covering avant-gardism in
theatrical art;
▪ comparative-historical - comprehension of
the ways of avant-gardism development in
theatrical decisions and in art in general;
Results and Discussion
Avant-garde theatrical art
The peculiar nature of culture is determined by
its existence and development in an open space.
Rejection of another “alien” culture implies a
comparison with one's own in a certain country
because it is a culture that is a reflection of the
spiritual life of the people concerned.
Historically Ukrainian culture has always
actively perceived alien cultural experience and
implemented some aspects so that the following
generations have already perceived some cultural
phenomena as their own national tradition. The
basic idea of avant-gardism is the freedom from
established traditions and social norms and
restrictions. From the position of avant-gardists,
the modern individual in the process of
knowledge of the surrounding reality should rely
on the primordial worldview, devoid of the
negative influence of civilization and restrictive
cultural norms (Grinyshyna, 2021, p. 9-10). The
main characteristics of avant-gardism should be
considered: an atmosphere of rebellion; guidance
for constant renewal and creative
experimentation; external-formal novelty;
epatage; amoralism; the principle of destruction
of the whole and installation of its debris;
collage; mosaicism; the stream of consciousness;
playful reincarnations. Avant-gardism implies
the destruction of traditional forms and canons, a
departure from the traditional. The peculiarities
of the Polish avant-garde were examined by
Dorota Jelewska and Anna R. Burzynska, who
believed that the heterarchical forms of the
interwar and postwar avant-gardes allow for the
contemplation of art in a combination of reality
and objects that are destroyed and are witnesses
of past and present events (Fazan et al., 2021,
p. 214-215). In the era of postmodernism, avant-
gardism is actively developing as an innovative
phenomenon through which culture is perceived
not as a tool but as a value (Turoiu et al., 2019,
p. 281-282). The contemporary theoretical
understanding of avant-garde art is substantially
saturated by experiences with neo-avant-garde
art. In the avant-garde, from which the neo-
avant-garde grows and to which it belongs, we
look for the equivalent of our current
expectations, repeated in this retrospective gaze.
Only in this way, only by turning back, can the
supposed potential of this art be revealed. The
historically determined purpose of the avant-
garde can be considered a revolutionary
influence on class consciousness (Armand, 2020,
p. 2). Avant-gardism in theater is a powerful
energetic basis, a kind of science that has its own
laws by which the new theater of the twenty-first
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century is built, departing from the established
traditions of the past and modeling a different
aesthetic. Bertolt Brecht is one of the most
popular playwrights worldwide and in Germany,
an experimentalist whose work has been of great
importance to the modern and avant-garde
theater (Müller-Schöll, 2021, p. 283-284).
The origin and development of avant-gardism
in Ukraine Early Ukrainian avant-garde actually
“sprouted” from the postulates of Ukrainian
modernism of the 1910s, although in the
theatrical practice of Ukraine the modernist
discourse proved to be quite limited, primarily
because of the content and plot and structural-
constructive plan of drama and creative practice
of the Young Theatre. Proceeding from the
principles of subjectivization of creativity
postulated by modernism, avant-garde art
resorted to a fundamentally new step in the
interpretation of A. Riegl's notion of “artistic”
will. The point is that the subjective element,
which was the object of the art research, in the
avant-garde is interpreted not as a special feature
of a particular individual, but as the way and
character of the behavior of entire generations,
social groups, etc. With the transformations of
the content paradigm, the formal plane of art
changes, which in avant-garde art acquires
exclusively abstract generalized forms since its
main task becomes the expression of the
subjective character of the masses. Man is a
social being, and theater is the most influential
way of expressing emotions and facilitating
interpersonal communication (Usakli, 2021,
p. 31). The formation of avant-garde tendencies
in Soviet Ukraine in the 1930s was suspended by
the active cultivation of socialist realism by the
Bolshevik authorities. After the Second World
War, one can observe the emergence of new
constructivist trends in music in the context of
artistic experimentation of the late 1950s, which
had gradually evolved and continued to develop
at the present stage (aleatoric, collage,
polystylistic, pointillism, serialism, sonorism,
and stochasticism). The advantage of musical
avant-gardism was the active introduction and
use of noise, natural effects, electro-sound
synthesis, and the use of mathematical-playing
models in compositional practice, etc.
On the one hand, theater can act as an ideal
platform to impress the public through the
production, and on the other hand, it can exert a
kind of political influence (Heinz, 2020, p. 8).
In contemporary art, neo-avant-garde
movements are closely intertwined, which is a
consequence of the emergence of fundamentally
new varieties of synthetic art.
Formation and development of creativity of
Andrii Zholdak
An art historian once remarked, “Theater in all
ages has served to reflect or analogize life, but in
the Hellenistic period one gets the impression
that life was sometimes seen as a reflection of
theater” (Puchner, 2017, p. 34). Avant-garde and
all of its tendencies are at odds with the
established tradition of theater.
Relatively little information is known about the
life of AndriiZholdak. He is a descendant of
famous theatergoers: great-grandson of
I.K. Karpenko- Karpenko-Kary, grandson of
Nazar Tobilevych, son of Valerii Zholdak -
journalist, playwright, author of plays “An
Inconvenient Man”, “Telephone Trust”,
“Chance”. He was born in November 1962 and
spent his childhood in the capital of Ukraine on
Turgenev Street. My mother spent most of her
working life as an editor at Scientific Thought,
which specialized in philosophical dictionaries,
treatises, grammars, etc. The artistic elite
instilled in the future director of the theater a taste
for all things beautiful and honed the author's
vision. Since childhood, as Zholdak notes in his
interviews, he was convinced that his life would
be associated with the cinema. Among the
favorites that the boy was guided by were the
Italian filmmaker F. Fellini, the Soviet filmmaker
of Georgian origin S. Paradzhanov and
Andrii Tarkovskyi. In parallel, he was fond of art,
even becoming a graduate of the then-
Republican Art High School named after
T. H. Shevchenko. By the way, here he meets his
first love - Larissa, by whom he will eventually
give birth to a son Panas. His adolescence falls in
the unstable, tumultuous 90s, so in an interview,
he noted “if I did not get into art, I probably
would have been a super gangster”, or already
been “crowned” bandit, or murdered, or
something else (Botsman, 2022). At the age of
18, forced to serve two years in the army in Lviv.
These times did not seem easy for a creative
person, but in the second year of “life by order”
Zholdak wrote the first scenario about an
invisible hero who had the ability to move in
space, contemplating how other people live.
Over time, AndriiValeriiovych will give his work
to his grandmother, who came from the glorious
Tobilevych family, for criticism.
Upon completion of service, Zholdak Jr. on the
recommendation of his father entered the Kyiv
National I. K. Karpenko-Kary Theatre, Cinema
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and Television University to the course of Serhii
Danchenko, who later told the young man that
directing is not his life's work because the student
has no talent. This led the boy to turn to Mykhailo
Reznikovych, with whom he spent an excellent
academic year, not losing enthusiasm, but on the
contrary - discovering new creative roles in
himself. He went to Novosibirsk, leaving his
studies at the university, and later will study at
the workshop of Anatolii Vasyliev in Moscow
Gitis. His career developed gradually: starting as
an assembler at the Lesya Ukrainka Theater.
Later became assistant director at the
KrasnyFakel Theatre. The artist also worked in
the pedagogical field, since 1988 Zholdak has
been teaching at Kyiv Institute of Arts, and also
took the initiative of creating the Ukraine-
Culture-Europe Foundation, the name of which
is already clearly identifiable with the director's
artistic aspirations and creative guidelines.
The artist's life path is not as controversial in its
events as his creative legacy. In the present, the
director's surname is immediately associated
with scandal, breaking the established patterns,
and epatage, because the artist could impress not
only his own audience but also caused a mixed
reaction among theater critics.
The creative path in the theatrical environment of
the famous Ukrainian avant-garde director
AndriiZholdak began back in 1989 when he
made his debut as a director of the small stage of
the Ivan Franko theater in Kyiv with the
production of the play “Moment” by
V. Vynnychenko. However, this particular
production was not as revolutionary and radical
as most of his later productions.
The theater has learning objectives that define the
contribution of theater to personal development:
social skills, interpersonal relationships,
attitudes, understanding, relationships, and
problem-solving (Rojas et al., 2021, p. 2352).
In 2002 Andrii Zholdak became artistic director
of the Kharkiv Taras Shevchenko Academic
Ukrainian Drama Theatre. Over the next three
years, the Ukrainian audience sees the
performances created by the director: “Hamlet.
Dreams,” “Moon of Love” (fig.1), “One Day in
the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” “Goldoni. Venice,”
and the Kharkiv troupe performs at dozens of
European festivals. For example, in the first
showing of Zholdak's Hamlet, the performer in
the title role bared himself to the last limit and
sang fragments of songs, thereby giving the
classical works a certain “popishness.” The other
dramatic actors in the dialogues did not even
communicate with each other but only shouted
and laughed and it did not even matter who
played what role. Zholdak realized the game of
puppet actors, where it is important to their
submission to the “puppeteer”. Scenes in
Zholdak's productions replace each other,
creating a kind of “parade of attractions” and it
encourages the viewer to solve cunning riddles.
Analyzing the artist's style in general, one can't
help but notice that his performances are an
eclecticism of style and content, based on the
principles of literary and theatrical classics.
Gradually associative and allusive elements are
strung together, which allows for better
disclosure of the globalism of the issues.
Philosophical categories prevail as a subject of
review and theatrical reflection in Zholdak's
performances, here are both love and power,
human cruelty, betrayal, ambition, and cynicism.
The poetics of dreams are uncommon.
A key feature of the director is playing on
contrasts. None of the performances passes
without unexpected visual, sound, costume, and
scenic, content metamorphoses. Sometimes they
form transitional parts, separating one action
from the other (as a rule, it is the cases when the
performance is built on a series of successive
pictures). The most expressive acts, using which
the viewer's attention is held, are those in which
high and elite culture are juxtaposed, as was the
case in “Romeo and Juliet. Fragment”, which is
further referred to as forbidden to show. We see
a similar thing in “One Day in Ivan Denisovich,”
where a famous opera singer, exalted by the
world of music, must give concentration in a
concentration camp; and in “Hamlet. Dreams,”
where vacationers disguise themselves as
destitute refugees. The composition of the mise-
en-scenes on a visual level does not always
correlate with the musical accompaniment, but it
is also part of the author's style. In the unruly
corporeality, nudity, and infantilism that the
actors convey, they reproduce a real picture of
the world as it was yesterday, and as it is now.
Zholdak quite often becomes a “victim” of
viewer criticism due to another characteristic -
the accumulation of dramatic views. We are
talking about scenes of rape, adultery, and
episodes from the life of prisoners. Undoubtedly,
elements of violence are present here, because it
makes to keep the whole audience in suspense,
and accordingly - the emotional background of
the target audience is included in the general
course of events in the play. Thus, the audience
and the participants in the performance become
one. Accordingly, the moment of release of
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tension from the audience becomes important as
well. Depending on the performance, Zholdak
chooses different options: problem-solving
(good triumphs over evil, actors come to a
common consensus), and concentration of the
audience's attention in other circumstances. The
superficial discomfort that accompanies a period
of tension is gradually replaced by the realization
of the sacred, valuable to each individual, which
he took after going to the theater. One such
example that most accurately reflects the above
is a play from Zholdak's repertoire, The Yellow
Prince, whose motif was a novel by V. Barca.
The events unfold during the Holodomor of
1932-1933. The physical and psychological
abuse of the Ukrainian nation under Stalin's
regime. The purpose of the play is ambivalent: on
the one hand, it is to inform the world about the
famine as a pre-planned anti-Ukrainian policy,
and on the other, to call for the development of
joint measures to prevent genocide and other
crimes against humanity. Any acknowledgment
of those terrible events was strictly forbidden in
the Soviet Union, so the novel did not appear in
Ukraine until 1991 after the country had gained
its independence. The play “Lenin's Love.
Stalin's Love” is based on the most tragic page of
national history, staged by the director to honor
the millions of victims of the Holodomor and to
remember the political system and its
government leaders, because of whom millions
of people died.
What is characteristic: The play begins at the
entrance to the theater. The audience enters the
theater room with a red wooden corridor that
makes a very strong impression, reminiscent of a
hall of blood, a place of crime and torture. The
walls of this corridor are covered with
photographs of hundreds of children who
suffered from starvation in concentration camps
from 1932-to 1933. The performance itself tells
the story of the inhabitants of one village, whose
peaceful life is changed in the blink of an eye. A
Stalinist plan called the Collectivization
Program, which is supposed to help meet the
nutritional needs of the Soviet Union, becomes
fatal for this area as well as for the entire people
of Ukraine. 1930s agriculture is the backbone of
Ukraine, but the scheme to combine peasant land
and cattle into collective farms results in the state
becoming significantly impoverished. All of the
characters in the play who personify communism
are deeply evil, cruel, and have inherently
inhuman traits.
Director Andrii Zholdak conveys the vision of
the work without any reservations, in a
straightforward manner, always subjecting the
source material to an unexpectedly frank
treatment, thereby filling the entire performance
with energy. Thus, for example, Château de
Barbe-Bleue (an opera interpretation being
shown in France in 2021 at the Lyon Opera
Festival) is structured according to the musical
principle of the theme with variations, which in
itself is an extremely bold solution in relation to
Bartók's classical version of the opera. It is
factors and episodes such as these that create a
full representation of the actual theme of war.
From a quantitative and qualitative point of view,
Zholdak has become quite productive during his
years abroad. Each performance is a
performance, a fundamentally new vision and
approach, which cannot be repeated by other
directors. Since then, he has also received
international acclaim: the director's works have
received honorary awards at festivals such as
Sibiu, BITEF, Nurderzon, Artistic Berezil, and
Golden Lion, and he has been a constant speaker
at specialized master classes in Finland,
Germany, Switzerland, and other European
countries. Moreover, Zholdak's “Charodeika”
was even nominated for the Opera Awards in
2020.
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Fig. 1. Performance “Moon of Love” directed by A. Zholdak, 2012 (Puchner, 2017)
Images in cinematography reproduce reality in
combination with the artistic vision of the
director, which is emphasized by the viewer's
perception of what he sees, providing vivid, rich
images of reality (Petrovici & Ivan, 2019, p.140).
But Zholdak's theatrical productions demonstrate
his attitude toward the dramaturgy of the source
material and toward the audience, drawing them
into provocative actions to make a stunning
impression. In other plays, One Day in Ivan
Denisovich and The Moon in the Village,
Zholdak does not follow a storyline through the
text, but rather uses footnotes around the play,
which causes surprise, displeasure, or admiration
in the audience. In the play “Goldone. Venedia,”
Zholdak departed as much as possible from the
author's source material. He used not so much the
plot and motifs of the play itself as derivatives of
these motifs, so the production was based on
associations, capturing the viewer. In the
production of “Romeo and Juliet. Fragment” was
already significantly noticeable the absence of
ethical criteria, that is, the rules of
communication with the audience, and did so
intentionally, with a provocative purpose.
However, Andrii Zholdak's productions have
been performed in theaters in many European
countries: Germany, Switzerland, Finland,
Sweden, Macedonia, Belgium, Romania, France,
etc. In Ukraine, the audience did not perceive
eccentricity and such a peculiar approach to the
construction of theatrical performances, and
therefore the director has gained great popularity
abroad. AndriiZholdak can be considered one of
the founders of a new directorial school that has
moved away from the basics of Soviet drama and
the linear construction of theatrical performance.
Zholdak's approach to the model of construction
and staging of performances is such that he goes
not to the text, as most domestic directors do, but
from the text, thus forming a new attitude toward
drama. “The uniqueness of Zholdak is that in his
productions he will approach the author's text,
not in terms of systematic analysis, but places it
in a new dimension, responding the soul of the
audience of any age and nationality, - said
OlehKokhan. - And I am sure that Ukrainian
audiences will soon feel it too” (Russian Literary
Newspaper, 2022, February 12) Zholdak is an
ambiguous figure in today's theater world, and
the evolution of his work is unpredictable. He
subjected his performances to unmotivated
associations, similar to fragments of dreams. At
the Lyon Opera, Ukrainian AndriiZholdak staged
“The Enchantress”. Tchaikovsky's enormous,
almost Wagnerian opera scares off directors and
is rarely staged. Zholdak handled the spike,
turning it into an erotic-religious blockbuster.
Zholdak stages The Enchantress more as a
comedy of passions: both bodily and spiritual.
But it's one step from farce to tragedy. How
Zholdak works with the actresses is a mystery,
but they play fantastically in his performances is
no exaggeration. And in musical productions,
too. What the main character Kuma does on
stage! There is a spectrum of debauchery and
sanctity; both benevolent innocence and demonic
seduction; and desperate irony - the actress can't
help but notice the grotesque nature of the
operatic heroine, and sincere fervor. Kuma dark
folk rumors made up the status of a sorceress - in
Zholdak's version, the heroine is not at all shy
about it and resorts to “witch” passes, being
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possessed by her men, naked and snapping like a
tigress. One of the play's main characters,
devoted to passions and vain attempts to pacify
them, naturally becomes Mamirov,
Tchaikovsky's old clerk and fried Catholic priest
for Zholdak; this role is played (and not only
performed) by Piotr Michinsky, a Pole. Mamirov
enters the opera straight from the service: the
overture is preceded by a video in which the
saintly father, having completed the ritual, goes
to the Lyon Opera House. By the way, it is very
different from other opera houses in the world: in
Lyon, everything is black, both the hall and the
foyer, where you cannot even find a normal
staircase, only elevators, and escalators; only
black mass and serve. On the days of the
showings of “The Enchantress”, the strangeness
of the place was heightened by the installations
scattered here and there for another production of
Dido and Aeneas, where the action will
apparently take place after a nuclear war: the
foyer is filled with showcases of human objects,
from surveillance cameras to food, all in decay
and covered in ashes (Rutkovskij, 2019).
Mamirov in the new “The Enchantress” is a
consecrated but modern man; he follows the
congregation with cameras embedded in the head
of a giant Jesus. By the second act, this giant
crucifix will be decorated and illuminated with
hundreds of lights, which is how crucifixes are
decorated in Latin America, where they don't
know the word “vulgar”. Yes, Zholdak began his
provocative games with religious symbolism
precisely in European opera - when he staged
Bohuslav Martin's Mirandolina in Giessen,
Germany. And he was the second director on
Earth after Paul Verhoeven to dare to claim the
erotic potential of the crucifixion: in Verhoeven's
The Fourth Man, the hero imagined his dream
boyfriend in the image of Christ on the cross.
However, Mamirov is not prone to bisexuality
(unlike the “earwigs,” a “tramp in the guise of a
black man” Paysius – Vasyl Yefimovboldly turns
into an angry and flirtatious androgynous). After
finishing his business and playing chess with the
computer, he puts on a virtual reality helmet and
flies to the Siberian village where Kuma lives,
drinks, and has fun. So, we find ourselves in
Russia, in a wooden hut (pickles on the shelves,
sticky tape of flies hanging on the shelves - like
in Soviet-era village houses), a wild kingdom
where a European tired of the dietary life is
drawn. The opening festivities of the opera,
Zholdak is not so successful. Instead of a one-
stage binge, he localized the action in two polar
points: on the right side, in the hut, where “vodka
and young,” Kuma in a country pink jacket is
kind to the dozens and awkward guests of the
trade; on the left, in the setting of the princely
bedroom, other people fumble around; it is a
mess with music. (The bedroom, the church, and
the “blight” seem to be a complex set of locations
where contradictory human nature searches for
itself; the author of the majestic and mobile set
design is simultaneously Andrii's son
DaniloZholdak, his regular collaborator for the
past four years) (Rutkovskij, 2019). After all, the
score in theater helps the director and actors
because it increases the emotional intensity of the
actors' performance (Pinchbeck & Egan, 2022,
p. 7).
At the end of the nineteenth century, Ibsen in the
Federal Republic of Germany became quite well
known and relevant to sociocultural changes.
Various avant-garde movements, such as
FreieBühne and the prominent theatrical figure
Max Reinhardt, regarded Ibsen's plays as leading
theatrical innovations (Schor, 2021, p.166-167)
In February 2022, the Romanian Drama Theater
premiered with a full house on the stage of a new
play by director Andrii Zholdak based on Henrik
Ibsen's “Woman from the Sea” (Fig.2). Invited to
direct Andrii Zholdak was George Banu,
honorary president of the International
Association of Theatre Critics. “In 1888, Ibsen
wrote A Woman from the Sea. We are now in the
year 2022. 134 years have passed... times,
meanings and forms have partly changed, there
have been some fractures and tectonic changes:
in the mentality of men and especially in the
mentality of women. My Ellida is still alive
today, I often meet her in different cities and
countries where I travel,” said Zholdak.
The audience erupted in applause, probably one
of the best productions since 1889. This play
should also be mentioned because female
psychology is another of the director's
weaknesses. Translating through the prism of his
own vision, he departs from the author's text and
the position of systematic analysis and places the
main idea of the work in a new dimension,
thereby making the performance accessible to
viewers of any gender, nationality, age. In doing
so, all the space is the most important part of the
performance, and the director works with it
carefully. Bringing all the components of
communication of the theatrical space (dramatic,
scenic, scenographic, play (gestural), textual,
internal) into a single whole entails
distinguishing two levels of dialogue: the first
level is an internal dialogue, it occurs within the
theater and forms theatrical specificity; the
second, outside fixed level, consists of coexisting
moments of social reality and is formed by
conditions and forms, of life activity.
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Fig. 2. The Woman from the Sea, directed by A. Zholdak, Romania, 2022 (Botsman, February 2, 2022).
Zholdak needs to recognize the polar states of
human existence. At one time he had to stage
several productions (each of which was
perceived by the artist as a transitional stage in
his work) in Scandinavian countries. And what is
the Scandinavian worldview? Imagine you've
taken a deep dive and are swimming very slowly,
looking at what's under the water. “The Cherry
Orchard,” staged in Finland, is a very slow five-
hour performance, not without reason that
Finnish critics, speaking of the play, remembered
Tarkovskyi. And the example of Zholdak's work
with the Germans (Kafka's “Transformation”)
shows another extreme. Knowing about the
discipline and technicality of German actors, the
director went on an unprecedented experiment:
he constructed the action in an ultra-intensive
rhythm, painted the score of a five-hour
performance, split every second. After a week of
rehearsals, the actors had a breakdown, they
defiantly put down their lyrics-notes…
An actor needs to be able to “activate” himself,
and quickly oppositely rearrange himself - to
enter a pause, to hold the state of inner tension,
and when it is not required - to run and shout. For
many art lovers who have repeatedly visited
Zholdak's theater, his performances are shouting
and running. There seems to be a certain grain of
rationality in this, but one must answer the quite
logical question: for what purpose is it done?
Only to come to a state of psychological pause,
which is what the great masters of European
theater have always sought. A pause on the stage
that does not have a deep meaning is meaningless
and deceptive.
Zholdak also expects a cultural explosion from
directors engaged in theatrical performances
directly in Ukraine: in Lviv, Kyiv, and Kharkiv.
He lacks sharpness, over-the-top truthful theses,
and perhaps even cinematic theatrical
productions. The need to develop cultural
volunteering, as it is accepted in the West, is
palpable. AndriiValeriiovych, as a true patriot,
considers the prospect of returning to his
homeland, which he declared at a creative
meeting in December 2021: “In general, I have to
come to you to knock down the sour cream,
because you gurgle a little,” - said Zholdak
(Faulina, 2021).
The work of director AndriiZholdak once again
confirms that a real work of art is deeply
subjective, individual, and unique. Before
acquiring a concrete form, an artistic image
develops, nurtured in the author's ideas. All that
is experienced and comprehended by the creator:
his vision of the world, his ideals, and the
meanings of existence are manifested in concrete
forms. It has always been difficult for avant-
garde artists to gain recognition from their
contemporaries, but Andrii Zholdak consistently
continues to amaze audiences with his innovative
experiments in stage art - from the passage-
metaphorical to the naturalistically shocking.
Consequently, the “Star” figure of A. Zholdak -
one of the most outrageous, intriguing by its
unpredictability directors - is impossible not to
notice in the firmament of contemporary
theatrical art. True, not national, but Western
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European stage production of the avant-garde
director resonates with the priority world trends
in theatrical culture.
The Meaning of Theatrical Avant-gardism
The innovative philosophical, aesthetic and
political platform of all currents of modern
theatrical avant-gardism acts as a peculiar form
of protest against traditional art. The main
conceptual ideas of avant-gardism, its general
features: an atmosphere of rebellion, the constant
installation of creative experimentation,
mosaicism, outrage, destruction of the whole and
installation of its debris in a new interpretation of
collage, playful transformation, stream of
consciousness (which is used in their own).
Experiments with sound technology are an
integral part of artistic avant-gardism and are
most characteristic of European avant-garde
movements (Rosati, 2019, p. 30)
The structure of the individual and the social
environment, as well as the process of
constructing reality, its perception, and
representation through communication, are of
great importance. The construction of social
reality takes place through communicative
actions as a process of coordinating
interpretations. Accordingly, once the
interpretive strategy is formed, it turns into
operational constructivism, and the actions of the
individual become social actions (Sandu &
Unguru, 2017, p.54).
On this basis, we can say that the theatrical avant-
garde is of great importance for modern society,
for socialization. In terms of content, art was
fueled by the cult of subjectivism and implied the
absolutization of inner experiences, an interest in
the depths of human psychology, namely the
subconscious. Therefore, theatrical avant-
gardism lacked the tools, life-like forms, and
acting techniques used by theatrical artists of
previous epochs. Freedom from tradition and
social constraints is the basic idea of avant-
gardism, the most widespread in Western
European countries. There is a problem of
preservation of identity in society and each
individual, which is associated with all-
encompassing globalization. The individual must
adapt to such conditions and have the ability to
switch from the internal environment (personal)
to the external through social interaction and vice
versa The external social environment to a
certain extent forms the inner world of the
individual (Nerubasska et al., 2020, p. 279).
Such a function is actively performed by the
theatrical productions of various avant-garde
movements in Europe, America, etc.
Conclusions
Contemporary Ukrainian theater actively uses
the heritage of theatrical modernism and avant-
gardism. This is evident both indirect quotations
of the director's drawings and in the development
of ideas proposed by artists of the first third of
the XX century.
Like any other “director's” production, Zholdak's
play touches on problematic areas of
contemporary musical-drama theater. One of
these is the definition of the aesthetic foundations
from which the radically-minded director
reproduces his own conceptual constructions on
stage. Another becomes the choice of
interpretative tools to be used in the process of
clarifying this kind of directorial statement.
Reproduction in the Ukrainian theatrical
environment of the avant-garde was short-lived
but weighty, and its artistic influence and
significance for the development of Ukrainian art
stretches far beyond chronological boundaries.
Artistic trends defined by avant-garde aesthetics
played a fundamental role in the form-making
processes of the Ukrainian theater for the
development of innovative artistic forms and
ideas. After all, the avant-garde directly is a real
foundation for the official Soviet art of the 1930s
and a kind of basis for the search of avant-garde
1960-1980s is of great importance to the
development of contemporary artistic trends in
the world context. Decisions Andrii Zholdak
cause mixed impressions: some admire him,
others - criticize, not perceived at all. But the
undeniable fact is that the avant-garde in Ukraine
has become a phenomenon virtually unknown, a
kind of tabula rasa, and it is Andrii Zholdak that
opens the Ukrainian public with a qualitatively
new approach to theatrical art.
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