Month: May 2018

Olga Ternova, the Ukrainian director, staged yet another play in Paris, working in conjunction with En Details Theatre Company. On April 28, the stage of the Pixel Theater hosted the premiere of The Rehearsal of the Past after “Detalizatsiya” a piece by Dmytro Ternovyi. This is one of the first contemporary Ukrainian drama plays staged in France.

The producing director points out that, according to the comments provided by the spectators after the premiere, the play hit home.

“The Parisians would share their impressions, saying they know nothing about the events in Ukraine, because the European mass media are now focusing on some other countries. The play, however, makes them curious about what’s going on in our country. The goal of staging in France was to make people aware of the recent and the current events in Ukraine”, says O. Ternova.

She maintains that “The Rehearsal of the Past” is a totally new experience for her.

“This is the first time that I produced two plays in a row after the same piece – one in Ukraine and the other in France where I had to keep my mind totally clear from the Ukrainian production. The net result was to profoundly different plays. En Details has an absolutely different stage design, different costumes, background music, visualization, mise en scene, and even the number of actors and acts. Unlike the production in the Theatre na Zhukah, here we ran a video of true events on the Maidan, because our task was to promote the emotional immersion of the French audience in the atmosphere of what came to pass”, pointed out O. Ternova.

The play proceeds in the form of a rehearsal with the actors breaking into spontaneous, improvised dialogues between the acts. They would talk about what’s happening in Ukraine or share the latest news about their country. Incidentally, in addition to the French actors, there are two actresses from Ukraine, and they answer to the questions from the Frenchmen and share their emotional experience of the past and ongoing events.

Most of the work was done in 15 days.

“It took about half a year for the participants to learn their parts. The common table was held by Skype. But all directing was actually done in 15 rehearsals. Part of the time was taken by the training courses, to help my actors get the hang of my work system. The language barrier went down pretty fast. In just few days we would finish each other’s sentences. Theoretically, one would expect some cultural divide between the Ukrainians and the Europeans but in fact there was none. We said our goodbyes, willing to keep on working together in the future”, said O. Ternova.
After the April premiere, the next performance is scheduled for June. Early in January, O. Ternova and En Details released the French version of Dorothea, the play scheduled for staging in the Perekryostok (Crossroads) Theater in April-May.

Dmytro Ternovyi and Olga Ternova are the co-founders of the Theatre na Zhukah (Kharkiv, Ukraine). “Detalizatsiya” was written just a year before the Maidan and proved to be prophetic in many ways. In 2012, it was found to be the best play of the main drama contest in Eastern Europe “Talk about borders. Living in the age of change”, which opened way to the foreign audience. Translated into German, Polish and French, and staged in Austria, Germany and France, the first production of “Detalizatsiya” in Ukraine was made by the Zhuki in December 2017.

For more details about the event, visit the Website of the cultural and information center of the Ukrainian Embassy in France.