You're reading: ‘Maidan: Voices From The Uprising’ makes its debut

Despite its tragic side, the EuroMaidan Revolution that toppled Ukraine’s ex-P​resident Viktor Yanukovych turned out to be a blessing in disguise for  the country’s culture. It resulted in a number of art​ ​works, short movies, and now a play.

“Maidan: Voices From the Uprising” is written by recognized Ukrainian playwright Natalya Vorozhbit and becomes the country’s newest product for cultural export.

The play is a docudrama told in the form of a diary and composed of the personal stories of the protest participants. Over last few months it was staged in Kyiv, Moscow and Gdansk. On May 22-24 it was on in London’s Royal Court Theatre. The play was performed as a staged reading.

“The aim was to explore ourselves, our deeds, our personal development through the EuroMaidan’s history,” explains Vorozhbit, who also was the active participant of the events on Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti Square.

Together with her friends from the “New Drama” group Vorozhbit spent three months of the revolution taking interviews with dozens of protesters. They revealed their reasons to join the protests and talked of their revolutionary routine.

“I tried dosing the sad and the fun in the play,” says Vorozhbit. “There are absolutely dramatic stories of the shooting witnesses. My aunt spent Feb. 18-20 on Maidan helping to transfer wounded, to stoke fires. Her story is very powerful. But there were also many hilarious ones.”

Vorozhbit quotes the volunteer doctors who were forced to encode their phone conversations so that the government’s security service, who allegedly wiretapped calls, could not understand them.

“They encrypted patients as ‘pizzas.’ And once upon a time someone really ordered a pizza, and a funny incident occurred as the other doctors rushed willing to help considering patients, not pizzas,” Vorozhbit says.

Another time she had an interview with a man who had a strange “weeping” problem.

“He belongs to that kind of intellectuals, who treats everything with a slight contempt,” says Vorozhbit. “But he came to Maidan at that very moment when people were singing the national anthem. Something happened to him and he began to cry.”

Since then he has been visiting Maidan on regular basis and cried every time he heard the anthem. So he went to the neuropathist to ask for treatment. The doctor had a rather cynical attitude and wrote a prescription for a total sum of Hr 600.

“I asked him whether his meds helped him. He answered that he was not sure, as the effect was expected in three weeks,” Vorozhbit says smiling.

The writer says her documenting work began as an obvious necessity. She joined protest in its first days.

“I didn’t have any doubts. I lived in Moscow for 10 years and I travelled and worked abroad a lot. I know the difference and as long as I planned to live in Kyiv, I was terrified by the change of foreign policy,” Vorozhbit recalls the beginning of the revolution provoked by the government’s sudden refusal to draw closer to the EU.

Soon Vorozhbit realized that standing on Maidan and providing protesters with food was not enough for her, and she came up with the idea of EuroMaidan’s dairy.

“Life will always be divided into ‘before’ and ‘after’ Maidan,” Vorozhbit says, summing up the experience. “At the age of 39 I found out that I don’t know people. On the one hand, there is great nobility, generosity, heroism, while on the other – meanness, aggression, intolerance. There was a feeling that some portal opened right on the Maidan and something primal, the people’s essence came out of it.”

With the current turmoil at Ukraine’s east, Vorozhbit says she is afraid to lose that hard won attainment.

Oksana Mamchenkova can be reached at [email protected].