The Maly Theatre hosted the festival “Cult of Kyiv. Kyiv of the Sixties”

From 26 to 29 June, the Maly Theatre hosted the Cult of Kyiv chamber festival of local art, an event that is set to become an annual tradition at the end of the theatre season. This year’s focus was ‘Kyiv of the Sixties’, so all events were dedicated to artists and works of this period.

The first day began with a meeting with the prose of Hryhor Tyutyunnyk. The theatre performance Cold Mint, directed by Anna Art, offered the audience an interpretation of five of the writer’s short stories – Ovary, Nura, Goat, Wild, and Cold Mint.

On the same day, the festival guests went on an excursion “60s. In love with Kyiv” with the third wave guide Anna Pylypenko. She became a guide on a journey dedicated to the generation that sought to revive Ukrainian culture.

“When choosing locations, it was important to start with the building of the Maly Theatre. It is symbolic that the Museum of the Sixties is also located in this building. Then I chose points of attraction for this environment in the surrounding space. In particular, the Rolit house, where the continuity between the generation of the Sixties and the executed revival was formed; the botanical garden, which is often mentioned in both poetry and memoirs; the university where many of them studied, as well as the Shevchenko Public Library and Park, whose figure was studied, in particular, by Yevhen Sverstiuk and Valerii Shevchuk,” says Hanna Pylypenko about the route of the event.

On the second day of the festival, we had a conversation with the heroes and the team of the Kyiv Citizens project about Kyiv in the 60s as photographed by the documentary photographer couple Iryna Pap and Borys Gradov. They talked about what the capital used to be like and how it has changed, what should be maintained and what should be abandoned. The event culminated in a warm conversation with the project’s hero, Serhiy, who shared his memories of Kyiv at the time: trams on Prorizna Street, the ‘frog’ on the slopes of Volodymyrska Hill, the winters of the time, and the Kurenivka tragedy.

This conversation was a logical continuation of the mission of the Kyiv Residents community: to discover the city from unexpected angles, introduce its inhabitants and help people to fall in love with it.

A poetry walk with Anastasia Yevdokimova opened the third day of the festival. Together with the reading expert and editor-in-chief of the cultural media outlet Sensor, the participants walked the central streets of Kyiv, recited poems by Mykola Vingranovsky, and even wrote letters to each other at the Kyiv main post office. It was not a tour, but rather a meditative immersion in words and moods.

‘Cult of Kyiv’ and performances

On the same day, the documentary Alla Horska. Strokes to a Portrait”, created on the occasion of the artist’s 95th birthday, was screened that day. The author of the idea is Olena Semenets. The film contains vivid memories of people who personally knew Alla Horska. After the screening, the visitors talked to the creators of the film and representatives of the Alla Horska and Victor Zaretsky Foundation.

In the exhibition hall, the official opening of the work ‘Street’ from 1959 depicting his favourite neighbourhood as captured by the artist and architect of the Sixties generation Anatolii Sumar took place. The chamber exhibition was organised in collaboration with The Naked Room gallery and the artist’s family.

“At the time of painting The Street, the family lived opposite the opera house. These were the places my father used to walk and loved. It seems to me that looking at this painting, you can feel the love he had for Kyiv,” said Anna Sumar, the artist’s daughter, during the presentation.

In addition, on the third day of the festival, the Maly Theatre staged the first performance of The Restless, based on the poetry, letters and personal diaries of artists of the 60s generation. The play’s director Maria Shvarneva says that most of the poetry for the performance was brought by the actors themselves: ‘I asked them to look for something that would resonate with them, because poetry should not only be understood with the head, but also felt with the heart.’

The play consists of three main parts:

• The apartment is a small bookish world where freedom, love, dreams and poetry reign.
• The theatre is an important part of the Contemporary Youth Club and at the same time a symbol of the Soviet system, where everything is controlled by one ‘puppeteer’.
• A barrack, a prison, exile – these are only remnants of a past life, and the actors read letters from exile and excerpts from diaries.

“We talk about them not to make us feel sorry for them. But to understand that we are at the same point in certain issues, and now we have the opportunity to go further, to live as honestly, brightly and freely as they did. We cannot rewrite their history, but we can write our own,” says Maria Shvarneva.

The third day of the festival ended with a music evening in the Vinyla space. It was hosted by music critic and editor-in-chief of Lirum, Oleksiy Bondarenko. The programme included cocktails, talks about Ukrainian pop music and vinyls from Oleksandr’s personal collection, including songs by Kobza, Smerichka, Vatra and others.

“It all started in 2017 with seven records by Sofia Rotaru. They were sold by a man on Facebook for a thousand hryvnias. Since then, I decided to collect early Ukrainian pop music,” says Oleksiy.

The final, fourth day of the festival began with two events at once. Both were about memory.

The first one was a combined collage workshop ‘On the Wings of the Borivitr’ with the artist Olena Zaretska, the granddaughter of Alla Horska and Viktor Zaretskyi. Together with Olena, the participants created a collage based on the 1960s Mariupol mosaic ‘Boriviter’, which was destroyed by the Russians in 2022.

“I have a personal obligation to recreate the mosaic and the memory of it. That’s why I held a workshop where we created a work in memory of the Boriviter. It is by joining the moment of creation that people remember and perceive this story better and deeper,” says Olena Zaretska.

The second was a tour of the Baikove Cemetery Memory Route to the graves of prominent Sixties artists, led by a third-wave guide, Hanna Pylypenko.

“This route is not about death, but about the importance of memory, and the cemetery is about gratitude to generations. During this walk, we tried to form this perception of these spaces. Walking through the ancient cemeteries, we see the continuity of generations – from the grave of Lesia Ukrainka, which was once visited by the Sixties, to the grave of Valeriy Shevchuk, one of the representatives of this generation who passed away a little over a month ago,” says Hanna Pylypenko.

The next event was an immersion in the study of a poetic text during a book club with Anastasia Yevdokimova. As part of the reading experiment, the guests immersed themselves in the study of the text, read and decomposed it into microelements, slowed down and contemplated the worlds that poetry opens up.

Afterwards, the festival guests split up again. Some went on the Open Air Museum tour with art critic Lizaveta German. They walked to the places where the artist and graphic artist Hryhorii Havrylenko had his studio, where Ada Rybachuk and Volodymyr Melnychenko worked, including the open-air garden with priceless monuments of Ukrainian monumental art.

Meanwhile, others were discovering the mysterious figure of Volodymyr Korotkevych at a lecture by Viacheslav Levytskyi entitled ‘The Most Mysterious Kyiv Sixties Artist: The One Who Walked in Pechersk with a Fantastic Elephant.’ The lecturer spoke about the artist’s life, read an excerpt from his Chestnut Leaves, and shared his archival letters and sketches. The lecture ended with a reading of the poem ‘The Street’.
The educational programme also included a lecture on Ukrainian cinema of the 1960s with film critic and Takflix coordinator Oleksandra Kalinichenko, entitled Kyiv Frescoes: Cinematic Visions in the Lens of the Sixties. They talked not only about the peculiarities of Ukrainian poetic cinema, watching Serhiy Parajanov’s film Kyiv Frescoes, but also about the key films and directors of this period. The audience also shared their own thoughts on the interpretation of Kyiv Frescoes.

The final event of the lecture programme was the lecture “The Sixties in 60 Minutes. Daredevils Against Empire” by historian Ivan Mishchuk. The lecturer outlined the influence of the Sixties on culture, explained why this generation became possible at that particular historical moment, and described how their era ended and how the fates of the most famous representatives of the movement turned out.

Cult of Kyiv and the Fair

During the last two days of the festival, a fair of local brands was also open, including:

• Staryi Lev Bookstore;
• Souvenir shop of the Alla Horska and Viktor Zaretskyi Foundation with products based on the works of the Sixties;
• Products from the Kyiv Citizens project;
• Marketplace of Ukrainian producers “Vsi. Svoi”;
• Aromatic handmade soap by Slava Krasovska, an actress of the Maly Theatre.

The fair also offered merchandise from the Maly Theatre and goodies from the Basamani bar.

The festival closed with a charity auction hosted by Vitaliy Gordienko, the creator of the Cinema Squad channel. Nine themed lots were sold for a total of over UAH 45 thousand. These funds, together with other donations raised during the festival, will help to purchase a necklace for the unit in which the Maly Theatre actor Daniil Mireskin serves.

The festival ended with the performance of the MOVA band on the theatre’s terrace with Ukrainian songs of the 1960s and 1980s in modern arrangements. These included everyone’s favourite ‘How Can I Not Love You, My Kyiv!’ and ‘Draw Me a Night’, as well as the well-known “Vodohrai” and ‘Don’t Trample on Lilies of the Valley’.

The theatre’s Instagram page is a great place to find out about upcoming events.

As a reminder, the Maly Theatre premiered The Voyage of the Discovery of Dr Leonardo based on the novel by Mike Johansen.