In Ukraine, she is often perceived primarily as the wife of Ukraine’s finance minister, but Olga Danylyuk, 42, made her name long before her husband Oleksandr Danylyuk got a job in the government.
Born in Lviv in western Ukraine, Danylyuk has lived and worked in London, New York, and Moscow. In 2017, she came back to Ukraine to be with her husband, who assumed office a year earlier, and decided to make the most out of the relocation.
So she became a stage director and curator of the Upper Floor theater laboratory at Mystetsky Arsenal exhibition center in Kyiv and decided to put all her effort into the development of Ukrainian theater, to bring new forms and colors into it.
“Ukraine is very culturally isolated,” Danylyuk says. “There is no cultural exchange here — the situation I cannot imagine in other European capitals. I would like to change that.”
She says that foreign theater companies don’t include Ukraine in their tours because Ukrainians aren’t ready to pay for tickets as much as Europeans do.
“Sadly, that’s why they are not interested in coming to Ukraine,” Danylyuk says.
Another problem is that the government does not invest enough into Ukrainian theater, so sponsors and private investors become the only salvation.
“Yet there are not so many people interested in theater as, for example, in movies, so it’s hard to find sponsors,” Danylyuk says.
To combat the trend, she invited Crew, a Belgian experimental performance group founded by Eric Joris and Kurt Vanhoutte in cooperation with scientists from Hasselt University, Belgium, to perform at Mystetsky Arsenal on March 23–25.
Crew bases its performances on science, psychology, and art. The audience wears virtual reality headsets, and Crew troupe performs psychological tricks on them. For example, people see themselves from a distance, or in a grave, or find themselves stranded on the edge of a skyscraper looking down.
Another New York
Danylyuk has been traveling since graduating Lviv National Academy of Arts in Ukraine. In 1991, she went to New York and spent a year there working with a Broadway designer, Tony Award winner Ann Hould-Ward.
“I came to Ann saying I want to work with her and that I am ready to mop the floors just to get this chance,” Danylyuk recalls. “She said I reminded her of herself in youth and gave me her personal assistant’s job.”
Danylyuk had to leave New York in a year when her visa expired, but it wasn’t the end of her career.
In 2005, she obtained the master’s degree in Central Saint Martins, a public art school at the University of the Arts London. In a year, she established an experimental theater in Ukraine with Ukrainian circus performers and Italian musicians, resulting in the “When We Were Gods” play, based on Ukrainian mythology.
In 2014, she obtained Ph.D. in Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London.
Her Ph.D. research was dedicated to the influence media had on the war and its perception. Choosing the topic, she had no idea that in a couple of months a war will unravel in eastern Ukraine, and Russian-led separatists will occupy parts of Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts. So instead of just doing a theoretical research, Danylyuk traveled to a real front line in her own country.
During that trip, she found out about amateur children’s theater that continued to operate in Novhorodske village in Donetsk Oblast near the front line. She decided to help these children, and together they staged a play called “The Letters to the Unknown Friend in New York,” directed by Danylyuk. In it, children read aloud candid letters they wrote about their feelings and lives.
Until 1951, Novhorodske village was known as New York village — originally founded by migrants from Germany, it was renamed during the Soviet Union. Danylyuk says that the play’s name has a double meaning, as it can refer both to the American New York City, as well as the Ukrainian village, depending on the perception.
Danylyuk brought the troupe to Kyiv to perform twice. Now she is planning their tour around Ukraine.
New life
Relocating to Kyiv, Danylyuk had to deal with complications she has never faced in other countries.
“Sometimes people perceive me not as an artistic soul, but as someone’s wife,” she says. “I do not like that, but there is nothing I can do to change that.”
Being finance minister’s wife has its benefits and downsides, but Danyluk does not let other people’s prejudices stand in her way. Her main goal is to bring the European theater culture to Ukraine, and she is not afraid of this new chapter of her life, she says.
Crew Belgian experimental performance group
March 23–25, 10 a. m. — 8 p. m.
Mystetsky Arsenal (12 Lavrska St.),
tel: +38044 288 5225
Hr 200
Tickets available at:
www.bit.ly/2Drmkud
