My Granddad was digging, My Dad was digging and I will not (2016)

My Granddad was digging, My Dad was digging and I will not 

A Polish–Ukrainian co-production created as part of the performative project Maps of Fear / Maps of Identity.

Five actors from different regions of Ukraine and from Poland explore the shared and personal past of their countries through the prism of individual experience. Is there a direct path from personal memories to collective memory? Why do collective memories sometimes suppress the individual ones? Who decides what must be remembered, and what is to be forgotten? And can something be considered “history” if it never made it into a museum or a school textbook?

The past demands to be dealt with – but how? How can we prevent the past from dictating the present, or, conversely, prevent the present – for example, national institutes of memory – from monopolising the past and reconstructing it anew? How do we resist a version of the past that insists on remembering only the wrongs suffered at the hands of others? A type of memory that seeks to turn us into victims?

We believe it is important to expose not only the social and political mechanisms at play, but also the theatrical ones – especially when the past and memory appear on stage through fiction, which always strives to be perceived as reality. Can the theatre – a space of imagined events and characters, illusions we choose to believe – become a place to investigate the mechanisms of memory and our complex relationship with the past?

In this performance, we work with our experience not only as theatre-makers creating another fiction, but also as citizens (of Ukraine and Poland), as political subjects who have the right to publicly ask difficult questions – of ourselves, our state, our city, our families – and to reflect on our profession, our theatrical education, and the theatre as such. We must acknowledge that this experience – ours, and not only ours – is steeped in trauma, which forms an important part of our identity. On stage, we put into practice an investigation into how the past works on us, and how we can work with the past. Work in such a way that lived trauma is not used as an excuse for the absence of responsibility.

Premiere: Kyiv, 24 & 25 September 2016 / GOGOLFEST

team

Directors: Agnieszka Blonska (Warsaw), Roza Sarkisian (Kharkiv)
Dramaturgy: Joanna Wichowska (Warsaw), Dmytro Levytskyi (Kyiv)

Set Designer: Alevtina Kakhidze (Kyiv)
Lighting Designer: Ihor Azarov (Bila Tserkva)
Scenography Realisation: Illia Dzhulai (Kyiv)
Project Curator: Joanna Wichowska
Producers/Project Managers: Liuba Ilnytska, Olha Puzhakovska (Mukhina)
Performers: Lukasz Wójcicki (Warsaw), Anna Yepatko (Lviv), Ivan Makarenko (Odesa), Nina Khyzhna (Kharkiv), Oksana Cherkashyna (Kharkiv)

excerpts from the reviews

• Jevgenja Olijnik, ”My Granddad was digging…: the chaos of memories”, cultural magazine Korydor, March 29, 2017, Kyiv; http://www.korydor.in.ua/ua/opinions/mij-did-kopav-haos-pamjati.html

From the beginning, the show „My Granddad was digging…” is deconstructing mental clichés, in which the last generations of Ukrainians were raised up, and which still, in even more horrendous form, are shaping our information space. The concept of traumatic past itself loses its power and turns into the number of causalities and prejudices that form our daily way of thinking.
“My mum used to teach me to wee quietly” – tells one of the actresses, and then she sits on the toilet and pisses loudly. Reaching the level of absurd in some scenes, the actors only show us, how far our inherited shame and guilt became inevitable part of our (and their own) life. At the same time, the performance doesn’t make the attempts to put the reality in order, or to criticize it. It rather demonstrates, what kind of chaos of ideologies, that have been mixed long before the time of getting the independence, we have to face. Like in the scene, when soviet patriotic song turns into German one, then into Polish one, and then – into Ukrainian one to reach the point of cacophony at the end. It seems, that the value of “My Granddad was digging..” lies in the ability of recognizing the chaos that is created on stage, since this is the same chaos that lots of us carry in ourselves. (…)

• Anastasia Golovnenko, “My Granddad was digging…: verbalization of subtexts”, Theatre.ua, September 2016, Kyiv; http://teatre.com.ua/review/ogolfest16-yskusstvo-dlja-lenyvyx

In this show verbatim and shock, theatrical display and theatrical, so to say, “anti-play” are combined in the best possible way. Confessions of four Ukrainian and one Pole become a manifesto of anti-theater, they open its structure and work against it. Dynamics, grotesque, and tragi-comic quality presented against the background of the black soil scattered on the stage, shovels, military helmets, monument of Lenin, and God knows what else – all of these, mingled together, creates a picture of the absurdity of today’s life.
The performance-challenge is gaining momentum, and getting closer to an end in the series of verbatim-monologues of the actors. In the finale scenes it reaches level of the pure outrageous excitement: penetrating yell addressed to the world around – it’s enough, you are a crap.

• Iryna Chuzhynova “Formal approach (chapter: Fanatic protesting)”, Ukrainian Theatre No 4, 2016, Kyiv

The show resembles the carnival-like anti-world, where the following things are all together ridiculed (read – questioned): everything that is visible and invisible, holy and sinful, the fundaments of "the temple" of traditional Ukrainian and foreign theater - with its affection for psychological, pretending, acting, with its "sacred" knowledge about human being, its stiff metaphors and civil pathos. In the show they dare to criticize even untouchable of the national faith, that have been – due to the efforts of particularly obstinate patriots –turned into the real fetishes. […]

One of the important paradoxes of “My Granddad was digging…” (…) – here, behind all this real or pretended brewery one can feel their overwhelming longing for a new (theater) faith. Mourning on the fact that after post-modernistic tornado, false and real have been mixed and turned into the specific cultural “surzhyk”. And now, in order to not get cheated, one needs to be critical, so: one needs to be alert and armed, prepared for the sacred war with simulacrums, that is with replicated copies which in fact don’t have any basis in the original.

• Yevgenia Nesterovych, “Enraged and honest”, Zbruch, October 10, 2016, Lviv; https://zbruc.eu/node/5713

And yet, they will also try to cry and self-pity, but this will be one more stylistic trick: the tears are not real, my pain is bigger than the pain of the others. Pop-music that everybody can recognize; pop-symbols, that everybody can read, the true, that everybody knows, but nobody speaks loudly.
Because we cannot lose hope, cause we have difficult situation in the country, we cannot speak about it, Lukas. This is not even about the fear of war – let’s be honest: in the course of two years it stopped being so terrifying any more. The authors of “My Granddad was digging…” are speaking not so much about this, as about something else: something kind of to tiny, to find its way to the field of attention right now (There’s a war in the country, and they…”): about the fear of our [Ukrainian] medical system, about brother who was drug addict, and who “didn’t die in this war”; about horrible patriarchal traditions still present in XXI century, when the men has to, and the woman should; about public theatre and hypocrisy; about kitsch, about fashionable training suits, and about how sick we are of all this. Enraged and honest, on stage they speak and do all this, what in our society is labeled as “to awkward and uncomfortable to be done”.


festivals

Міжнародний фестиваль сучасного мистецтва «Гоголь Фест» (2016, Київ)
Міжнародний фестиваль сучасного мистецтва ”ТЕРРАФУТУРА” (2016, Херсон)
Міжнародний форум “ГАЛІЦІЯКУЛЬТ: ПОГРАНКУЛЬТ” (2016, Харків)
Фестиваль-перегляд української незалежної сцени «Desant.UA. Український театр критичний» (2017, Варшава)
Міжнародний фестиваль сучасного мистецтва «Гоголь Фест. StartUp» (2016, Маріуполь)

reviews, texts

Євгенія Олійник. Мій дід копав…»: Хаос пам'яті
Анастасія Гайшенець. Desant.ua/Десант.ua: війна зі стереотипами та мистецтво провокації
Анастасія Головненко. Кінець удавання: мапи ідентичності українського (а)театру
Євгенія Нестерович. Розлючені й чесні
Любов Ільницька. Десант незгодних
Юлія Голоднікова. Посттравматическиесимптомы Украинской „Новой Драмы”: Опыт понимания насилия
Anna Korzeniowska-Bihun. Krajobraz po bitwie (pl.)
Dorota Sosnowska. Teatr krytyczny, wojna i przypadłość (pl.)
Ladies and Ladies Z Oksaną Czerkaszyną rozmawia Monika Kwaśniewska (pl.)
https://www.dwutygodnik.com/artykul/7450-teatr-za-piec-hrywien.html?print=1
MÓJ DZIAD KOPAŁ. MÓJ OJCIEC KOPAŁ. A JA NIE BĘDĘ (pl.)