Gogolfest has been Ukraine’s attempt at making contemporary art prestigious. For the fourth straight year, it will be gathering artists and art lovers in Kyiv on Sept. 4-12.
Vladyslav Troitsky, the festival’s organizer and theater director, said networking is as important here as any other aspect. “Well-educated youth who read good books, watch good movies and listen to good music are still outnumbered in Ukraine. Gogolfest is a unique place where these people can meet and look into the eyes of other intelligent people, as well as advance develop ones’ knowledge,” Troitsky said. “What we try to create here is not alcoholic lawlessness but an altruistic atmosphere of both intelligence and festivity at the same time.”
Named after the legendary writer Nikolai Gogol, whom both Russia and Ukraine claim as their own, the festival brings together all forms of art, including theater. Last year it gathered about 800 artists from 25 countries, and an estimated audience of 150,000. This year the number of visitors is expected to reach 250,000.
The festival will produce its own newspaper in three languages – Ukrainian, Russian and English – to provide spectators with a schedule of events and introduce them to performers and artists. The festival will feature plays produced by Ukrainian, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Swiss and Hungarian theaters, as well as classical and electro-acoustical modern music, 20 dance parties and live concerts, 15 video and sound installations and performance acts, and non-fiction, art house and documentary movies, literature master-classes and meetings with Ukrainian writers.
Kyiv’s female band Dakha Brakha performing at Gogolfest in 2009. (Yaroslav Debelyi)
One of the major events of Gogolfest’s program will be its grand opening at Independence Square (Maidan Nezalezhnosti) on Sept. 4. Organizers expect 200,000 viewers to attend the joint show program called ‘Multivers’ by Troitsky’s theater Dakh and Spanish urban theatre La Fura dels Baus.
Since 1979, Barcelona’s La Fura dels Baus has made some 2,500 performances and shows all over the world and is famous for its use of unusual settings, blurring of the boundaries separating the audience and actors. For the first time in Ukraine, more than 100 people will take part in the show, creating a huge ‘human net’ wheel that is supposed to symbolize the universe moving around. The rest of the shows and exhibits will take place at Dovzhenko film studio on Prospekt Peremohy in Kyiv.
The festival could not take place in its usual location, Mystetsky Arsenal in the heart of Kyiv, across the road from Pechersk Lavra. The official reason was because the structure is undergoing reconstruction, and the organizers found out about it just two months before the event was scheduled to start.
“Gogolfest might not have happened at all this year,” says Troitsky. “You know, it’s not a done thing to change the location two months before the event. At least, it’s not something that happens to major artists who make their schedules a year ahead and who were about to come to Ukraine. This time many of them simply refused because of that change.”
Troitsky has major plans for his festival in the future: to organize it in six other cities of Ukraine. “Next year … our team [of some 30 people] will make its best effort to spread the festival atmosphere throughout Ukraine.” He is also planning to open a 24-hour club on Mykhailivska Square in Ocotober called “The dead souls” after one of Gogol’s novels, for actors, writers and musicians.
What: Gogolfest-2010
Where: Dovzhenko film studio (44 Prospekt Peremohy, near Shulyavska metro station), Sept.4-12. Admission is free. Theater tickets: up to Hr 50.
The full program of the festival is available at: www.gogolfest.org.ua/eng/program
Gogolfest at a glance
Here are some of the more unusual or curious performances from the massive schedule of events.
For a full schedule, please visit http://www.gogolfest.org.ua/eng
| What | When | Where | Why |
| ‘Multiverse’ show by Kyiv theatre Dakh and Spanish urban theatre La Fura dels Baus | Sept. 4, 9 p.m | Independence Square (Maidan Nezalezhnosti) | A massive show with 100 participants, creating a living “human wheel” meant to symbolize the universe moving around |
| Room Pieces sound installations by Michael Schumacher, a composer, from New York | Sept. 5-7 at noon | Dovzhenko film studio | Multi-channel sound installations that are supposed to demonstrate how sounds occur in the real world, some loud, some soft, some near, some far, some disturbing, some persistent, some abrupt. |
| Docudays UA | Sept. 5, 2 p.m. | Dovzhenko film studio (cinema) | Featuring beast human rights documentaries from Ukraine’s ‘Docudays UA’ festival |
| Music from Kimmo Pohjonen Kluster (Finland) and Kyiv’s DakhaBrakha | Sept. 5, 9 p.m. | Dovzhenko film studio (concert stage) | Kimmo Pohjonen and electronic percussionist Juuso Hannukainen should make a curious combination with the Ukrainian female vocal group Dakha Brakha |
| Animation.by | Sept. 7, 5 p.m. | Dovzhenko film studio (cinema) | Animation shorts from Belarus Spring 2010 |
| Room sketch by Moscow Museum of Modern Art | Sept. 7, 7 p.m. | Dovzhenko film studio | Interactive performance involving drawing and sounds. A big sheet of white paper is placed on the floor, and the performance use it for drawing and producing sonic effects. |
| Children of the Otter | Sept. 9, 7 p.m. | Dovzhenko film studio (concert stage) | This is an opera, written by the renowned Russian composer Vladimir Martynov and based on Siberian folklore cult of Otter as ‘mother of all people’ |
| ‘Third Eye’ workshop by Hans Tammen | Sept. 11, 8 p.m. | Dovzhenko film studio | Workshop uses the ‘third eye orchestra’ concept, based on a score that is rearranged every time the music is performed, and which is adaptable to any instruments |
| Chamber music concert by ‘New Era Orchestra’ | Sept. 12, 5 p.m. | Dovzhenko film studio (chamber stage) | New Era, one of Ukraine’s few non-state chamber orchestras, performs a program created with an eye to the trends in European classical music |
| Liquid Theatre performance | Sept. 12, 8 p.m. | Dovzhenko film studio (open-air) | Liquid theatre, the winner of the Golden Mask, Russia’s national theatre award, works in the site-specific genre. Performances emerge from the space and locations where the actors find themselves, from streets to theatre stages |
Kyiv Post staff writer Iryna Prymachyk can be reached at [email protected].
