Can contemporary performance regain the critical power in mass media culture?
New strategies, creative challenges and adventures in the director's world.
New strategies, creative challenges and adventures in the director's world.
"There is no longer a fiction that life can confront, even in order to surpass it."
Jean Baudrillard
If a building becomes architecture, then it is art
Projects
"We are fated to invent realities for the rather straightforward reason that we are barred from accessing reality-in-itself."
LETTERS TO AN UNKNOWN FRIEND FROM NEW YORK
16 teenagers from the war zone took courage to talk about the life under shelling. They take the audience on the journey to the frontline towns, expressing themselves in their letters to the unknown western friend. Promenade performance takes place in 10 locations, each one nothing like other…
PENTECOST BY DAVID EDGAR
PREMIER IN UKRAINE UNDER THE TITLE 'ZARUCHNIKI'
PREMIER IN UKRAINE UNDER THE TITLE 'ZARUCHNIKI'
Zaruchniki- a side-specific production telling the epic drama of cultural conflicts of post-communist society centered around the new art discovery. What if the Renaissance began earlier and elsewhere ?
WHEN WE WERE GODS
Physical theatre performance When We Were Gods, Ukraine/Italy (Three weeks ****) NightNews *****)
presented at Hill Street Theatre at Edinburgh Fringe
presented at Hill Street Theatre at Edinburgh Fringe
CONTACT LINE
Contact Line is an Immersive performance project developed with the creative youth that was divided by the frontline in Eastern Ukraine. They never thought that their region could be so brutally torn apart. For the first time the participants speak openly from the both sides of conflict. The audience is taking on a dark journey through the first year of war, which changed the children lives forever. How do young people experience this war from the opposing sides? How different is the life of young generation in DNR and LNR from their fellows in the Government control territory? What they keep silent about? Why they hate media representation of war? There are many questions that require some answers. Finally, the " war weary" Ukraine agreed to the so called "Steinmeier Formula", possibly in it's most Moscow -friendly interpretation. After 13,000 people dead, a quarter of them civilians and up to 30, 000 wounded there is no justice... And it hurts.
Curator
"There is no formula to the way we make theatre… It starts with an itch, a need, an instinct… We gaze at books and films, sketch and begin to form a concept; an environment in which the story can live, in which the actors can play. This physical world holds meaning and narrative, it is as much a story telling tool as the written word."
Emma Rice
Artistic Director, Shakespeare's Globe
Emma Rice
Artistic Director, Shakespeare's Globe
Dr. Olga Danylyuk - Founder and Curator of Theatre Lab, Mystetskyi Arsenal Unread messages
Upper Floor - is an interdisciplinary performance space dedicated to new theatre forms and practices
Upper Floor - is an interdisciplinary performance space dedicated to new theatre forms and practices
Performance curators occupy an "increasingly essential role in a transformation of the theater's defining edges,"
More then a Game
More than a Game was an incredibly versatile performative space created by artists, including creative workshops and minifestival of inclusive performances produced for the Arsenal of Ideas Family Festival. The aim of the festival was to celebrate our differences, equality, creativity and to promote creative methodologies in inclusive education.
OpeRaArt
Inclusive performance improvisation workshops with professional musicians and dancers for people with disabilities. Workshops were conducted by Dr.Anat Ben-David, an artist resident in Somerset House, London. The interdisciplinary work process of wokshop creates dynamic interaction of visual, sonic and semantic elements that govern the performance of language. By making links between random fragments of language and signs, the meaning can be generated without assuming that the sonic and the visual elements are directly answerable to a semantic one. Rather, the content surfaces through a constant migration between all three elements.
Lectures - demonstrations by the renown Belgium collective CREW
CREW was founded in Brussels in 1991 by Eric Joris. CREW operates on the border between live art and science, between performance art and new technology. CREW creates immersion-based live-art performances and was the first to combine 360° Omni Directional Video (ODV) and Head-mounted display (HMD) for delivering an 'Alternative Reality' ('AltR'). Unlike sitting and standing Virtual Reality applications, CREW's work delivers 'AltR' which is anchored the physical: by moving, walking and running the 'immersant' experiences the virtual world from within his own body.
Lecture by David Edgar
About contemporary British drama edited The first public reading of Ukrainian translation of Pentecost
David was one of the first British playwrights to establish the School of Dramaturgy in Birmingham University and holds the position of literature consultant at Royal Shakespeare Company. His plays won numerous awards, including The Society of the Theaters of the West End Best plays, Tony Award (USA), Plays and Players for the Best Play. His works have been performed in Ireland, throughout Western and Eastern Europe, America, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Japan.
David was one of the first British playwrights to establish the School of Dramaturgy in Birmingham University and holds the position of literature consultant at Royal Shakespeare Company. His plays won numerous awards, including The Society of the Theaters of the West End Best plays, Tony Award (USA), Plays and Players for the Best Play. His works have been performed in Ireland, throughout Western and Eastern Europe, America, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Japan.
"PLAYING UP offers the tools to take risks, wrest back agency and question power relationships. All while having fun and making art."
Lyn Gardner, The Guardian, April 2016
Lyn Gardner, The Guardian, April 2016
PLAYING UP is an artwork by Sibylle Peters (of Theatre of Research,
Germany), exploring the potential of Live Art to bridge generations. Drawing on key Live Art themes and seminal works, PLAYING UP takes the form of a game played by adults and kids together.
Germany), exploring the potential of Live Art to bridge generations. Drawing on key Live Art themes and seminal works, PLAYING UP takes the form of a game played by adults and kids together.
Upper Floor is hosting Public play-ins of PLAYING UP for the first time in Ukraine.
If a building becomes architecture, then it is art
Research
Dr. Olga Danylyuk
Olga completed her PhD at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London and holds a MA degree in Scenography from Central Saint Martins College.
Her thesis titled: 'Virtually True'. Intermedial Strategies in the Staging of War Conflict explores the relation between art and politics in the form of war conflicts and reconsiders mainstream narratives of war representations. Her research projects exploit aspects of popular cultural forms like clubbing, museums and digital gaming in order to create new affective experiences for the audience that might question the popular imagination of war. This approach is reflected in intermedial performance work, which encompasses film, photography and animation as prevailing creative tools in contemporary culture. It also explores the social and political implications of contemporary media practices.
Her thesis titled: 'Virtually True'. Intermedial Strategies in the Staging of War Conflict explores the relation between art and politics in the form of war conflicts and reconsiders mainstream narratives of war representations. Her research projects exploit aspects of popular cultural forms like clubbing, museums and digital gaming in order to create new affective experiences for the audience that might question the popular imagination of war. This approach is reflected in intermedial performance work, which encompasses film, photography and animation as prevailing creative tools in contemporary culture. It also explores the social and political implications of contemporary media practices.
The thesis explores the relation between art and politics in the form of war conflicts and reconsiders their representations, avoiding overused tropes such as the 'war on terror'. Lesser known modern conflicts form the material for the enquiry, which resulted in three research performance projects:
Death Club
Challenges the authenticity of representations of the Chechnya war by layering codes and conventions of established genres in performance space. The project reflects on the spectatorial side of war, exploited by media, drawing on the corresponding ideas of Debord and Baudrillard in this respect.
Soldiers of the Last Empire
Explores the 'quest for truth' in documentary-making processes, based on interviews with combatants involved in various conflicts since the collapse of Soviet Union
Serious Games
Investigates role of fiction in the perceptions of war through similarities between literature and digital fictions of a heroic past. For this purpose the epic historical novel Taras Bulba by N. Gogol is revisited in mediatised culture.
If a building becomes architecture, then it is art
Portfolio