The director and director of the national drama center of Normandy Lucie Berelowitsch, at the initiative of a petition in solidarity with Ukrainian artists in the face of the Russian invasion, salutes the role of the cultural world in the resistance which is organized in the country.
Lucie Berelowitsch is a director and director of the Préau, the national drama center of Normandy-Vire, in Calvados. With Stanislas Nordey, she initiated a short petition signed by a large number of directors of stages in France who show their solidarity and their desire to welcome Ukrainian artists to France. Russian-speaking, she studied at the Moscow Conservatory and was preparing to start rehearsals in April for her next play, with a Ukrainian troupe, the Dakh Daughters.
What is the impact in Ukraine of such an approach?
With Stanislas Nordey, we wanted to act very quickly. The short text has been translated into Ukrainian and is circulating widely on social networks. From today it will have a relay in the Ukrainian press. The impact is essentially psychological and we can consider that this is not enough, that we should be able to protect the Ukrainian sky. Showing our solidarity, ensuring that we will be there to welcome them, finding accommodation for families is already very important. In the messages that I receive, I realize that the attention of all of Europe – and in the particular case of artists, our commitment today but also in the future – is in no way negligible in the context of a resistance which is organized extremely well.
Paradoxically, since the start of the war on Thursday, many Ukrainian men and women have given up on leaving their country… They even seem determined to stay. Is it a strong choice and a change of perspective, or because they can’t help it, it’s too late to hit the road?
What is happening before our eyes is impressive: we thought that Kiev was going to be attacked much more quickly. Many of my friends who thought they were on the road stay both because it no longer makes sense when the whole of Ukraine is bombed, but also because they have decided to resist and they say that their place is in the country. Some of them believe today that they can win this war despite the disproportion of forces.
My point of view is fragmentary but to date, I don’t know anyone who has arrived on the other side of Ukraine. The announcement by France and Germany to arm the Ukrainians has something to do with it. I am intimately very worried, but in the people I talk to, I feel a very great determination that it would be too quick to place under the sign of unconsciousness: they say that they have the right to be free and duty to fight for their country.
How to explain that the resistance was so efficiently and quickly organized?
The war started eight years ago. They had time to arm themselves psychologically. On the other hand, the Russians will not be able to hold on indefinitely if Kiev does not give up.
In this resistance, what role does the cultural world play in Ukraine?
In this war that Putin legitimizes by claiming that Ukraine is a fiction and never existed, artists are revitalizing Ukrainian culture, history and language. I am thinking in particular of the Dakh Theatre, one of the only independent troupes in Ukraine – that is to say which is not affiliated with an official theatre. Vlad Troitskyi, 57, created a theatrical venue from scratch in an apartment twenty-six years ago. We enter a hall, then a real theater that he built. From this Dakh Theater two very large music groups were born: the Dakh Daughters – six women currently all still in Ukraine – and the DakhaBrakha. Both are rooted in Ukrainian folklore, while opening it up and transforming it enormously.
Vlad Troitskyi also has his own troupe and he created the Gogol Fest, an independent festival with filmmakers, visual artists, musicians and actors, which takes place in several cities in Ukraine. All this artistic effervescence is fundamental in Ukraine, which has been rebuilding itself as a nation state since the end of the USSR and its independence, and culture has unfolded more freely since the Maidan revolution of 2014. There were two official languages until Ukrainian independence. Thanks to the meeting allowed me by Stéphane Ricordel of the Monfort theater, I was able to Antigone with the Dakh Daughters, and Ukrainian comedians, we had chosen that the official speeches of Créon be in Russian, but that the intimate language be Ukrainian. The difference between the two languages is analogous to that between Italian and French.
Elena Kovalskaya, who runs the Vsevolod Meyerhold State Theater in Moscow, has announced her resignation because she cannot “to work for a murderer and collect a salary from him”. Similarly, the Garage Museum – the equivalent of Beaubourg – in Moscow has just announced that it is suspending all activity in protest. Just like the Russian choreographer Alexeï Ratmansky who has decided to cancel his next creation. How is solidarity with the Russian artistic world, which shows its opposition, operated?
There are more and more artists, researchers, intellectuals who are mobilizing notably through a petition launched by Marina Davydova, director of the journal Theater, critic and festival organizer that we should relay. To tell you the truth, we do not yet know how to organize the support, but a very large number of cultural places in France are ready to organize the hospitality of their institutions and artists, first and foremost Ukrainians, but also Russians who would be clearly declared once morest the war and endangered.
