Documentary Theatre as Witness in Ukraine

Ash Marinaccio: Hey, friends. It’s Ash, your host for the Nonfiction Theatre Forum podcast, produced for HowlRound, a free and open platform for theatremakers worldwide. The Nonfiction Theatre Forum brings together artists, documentarians, journalists, scholars, and theatremakers to explore the wide world of nonfiction performance, from documentary and autobiographical work to ethnographic, verbatim, and tribunal theatre—and everything in between. Together, we’ll dive into how these forums intersect with community, collaboration, ethics, staging, and more.

All right, friends. We have made it to the final episode of our first season of the Nonfiction Theatre Forum. Thank you. Thank you for joining us on this journey, for listening, for thinking, and imagining alongside us as we’ve explored the intersections of documentary, community, and performance.

Today, we’re closing out our first season by traveling, sonically, to Ukraine. Our guest, Veronika Skliarova, is a producer, cultural manager, activist, and arts journalist from Kharkiv in Eastern Ukraine. She’s also the founder of ART DOT, one of Ukraine’s leading independent multidisciplinary arts organizations. ART DOT creates artistic and educational events that spark civic activism and foster social responsibility. Their work cultivates an ecological space for meaningful change, helping to shape a new Ukrainian identity while confronting issues such as inclusion, media manipulation, and human rights.

Beyond ART DOT, Veronika has led an impressive range of projects. Let’s hear an excerpt from one of her pieces, a collaboration with Artists on the Frontline called, With Fire and Rage. It’s an immersive audio piece that follows artists on the frontline in Ukraine. Combining testimony with video, visual art, photography, poetry, and music, this smartphone-based performance explores the role of creativity and resilience in the face of invasion.

Olha Puzhakovska: [Performing in With Fire and Rage] On the twenty-fourth of February 2022, the day of the full-scale invasion, we made a plan of how to defend the theatre, and how we could avoid it being captured. It’s the highest building in the district, and right across the street, there is a big military base. So, we put razor wire anywhere a person could climb onto the rooftop, and some of the staff began to make Molotov cocktails. This was the first day.

The war had already been going in the east for many years, so full-scale invasion was not a surprise, but still, in the sharp moment of crisis, we were lost, and we didn’t know how to adapt our work.

At first, it was very chaotic. We had no sleep. Every day, we had meetings with the whole theatre team. We made a lot of mistakes, but we tried to find the best solutions. We started by setting up the spaces for refugees and cleaning the basement that became a bomb shelter. We invited not only artists, but anyone who had to flee, and needed a space to stay. Many of our staff didn’t feel safe in their apartments, so they also lived here.

Ash: That was Olha Puzhakovska, executive and artistic director of the Lesia Ukrainka Theatre, who shares how her team transformed their venue into a crisis response and humanitarian center, and even developed a plan to defend it with Molotov cocktails. This is from With Fire and Rage, which premiered as an immersive audio tour.

I’m so happy to have you here, and I’ve so enjoyed getting to know your work and to read about you and just the incredible projects you’re working on.

Can you introduce yourself and your work for the audience, for the listeners?

Veronika Skliarova: My name is Veronika Skliarova. I’m now based in Lviv in Ukraine, but actually I’m from Kharkiv. It’s a big city, like industrial center on the east parts of the country, which is now frontline territory, so I had to flee and relocate.

My background is theatre studies. I’m a theatre critic, theatre historian. I started to be theatre producer and cultural manager. I was leading one of the biggest theatre festival, art festival in Kharkiv. And after that, after full-scale invasion, I focused more on cultural diplomacy. We are making different productions with the directors inside Ukraine, but also outside Ukraine. Also, I curated Ukraine and Pavilion for Avignon Theatre Festival and collaborated with different international festivals to bring Ukrainian programs there to show what has happened in contemporary theatre there.

Ash: What is the current theatre situation where you are in Ukraine?

Veronika: Theatre life is very vivid for the moment. I think in all countries during the crisis, art is something very fast to respond, but also, we know it’s on the example of Bosnia where people during the siege, during the snipers’ attack, was going to fill our money, for instance. And it’s the same in Ukraine. Theatres are working. Non-governmental sector is a little bit in more complicated situation, but governmental sector, all theatres are working, and it’s a lot.

For instance, here in Kyiv, the biggest city in Ukraine, we have here six governmental theatres and one national opera that have at least two or four stages and they have performances every day. So, it’s a lot. And yeah, the situation and the world has also shifted and there are a lot of interest to Ukrainian art. So, it’s also kind of claimed back its own voice, not being like Russian colony or country where Chernobyl nuclear station collapsed, but it’s actually a country with very strong and good contemporary art.

Ash: Our podcast focuses on documentary theatre and nonfiction theatre. So, I’m going to be asking you questions about your work primarily related to that, which is so exciting. You have a number of projects, and I met you, actually, through Artists on the Frontline.

Zoe [artistic director of Artists on the Frontline] has spoken so highly about your work and your collaborations together. What has been your experience of making documentary theatre in this moment of crisis? And how do you think documentary theatre works in times of conflict? How has it worked for you?

Veronika: Yes. I’m thinking where to start. I’m also lecturer in theatre, working in university. So, I have whole lecture about history of documentary theatre in Ukraine, and I’m trying to build these puzzles in my head how to start in the best way. If we are talking about my own projects and big projects around documentary theatre in Ukraine, we have very, very strong movement in Ukraine since 2014. After evolution of dignity, a lot of theatres started to think about testimony-based moments, putting survivors in the center of the stage. Also playback theatre, theatre oppressed, and all other types of documentary theatre. Also, we have very strong play writers who work with the documents. So, it’s quite important. And for the moment, I can see the huge value of documentary theatre in Ukraine in both ways.

First of all, we can shift the hierarchy. We can shift this idea of represented classical pieces and put in the actual experiences on the stage.

During the war, the fragmentation in people’s experiences is huge, and these fragmentations naturally leads to conflict even inside the society. Even if we have outdoor enemy, we also can be not well inside the country. And documentary theatre, by sharing these different, deep experiences, can really help to put it all together. For instance, now we have very strong movement of theatre of veterans and for people here in warfare, not in the frontline, it’s very hard to understand what is going on in trenches, and what contemporary work can look like, for instance. And this experience that this theatre of veterans that put the veterans themselves. They’re staging pieces, they’re writing texts, they’re performing, making stage readings. It’s also kind of very important social gesture to overcome this tension, but also, in terms of transitional justice, collecting and kind of archiving a lot of oral history narratives when we are working with the documents and with experiences.

The last amazing project, which is not mine, but it’s amazing. I think it was presented in London. It was a project made by social activist Natalia Gumenyuk And it’s a lot about human rights and crimes against humanity that they gathered in the territories that was occupied, like Kherson region and Kharkiv region. And after Ukraine claimed back the territories, they went there to collect actually the stories for ICC, for International Criminal Courts. And that’s how actually this theatre piece was made. And I think it’s really powerful and amazing.

I think piece that we made with Zoe, for instance, for Eurofestival and Liverpool was also based on oral history and interviews of ten amazing artists that choose to fight against Russia, to fight for Ukraine in different fronts, let’s say. One director decided to go to the frontline and took the weapon, but another director of theatre, she turned the theatre to a shelter and they hosted more than one hundred and fifty people who were coming and going because Lviv was kind of transitional point.

People from east were fleeing to Europe and Lviv was this hub that give people this opportunity to set the itinerary, to have the train, to think where they will go next, et cetera. So, this respond was quite fast. And then we had an amazing interview of one artist who lived through occupation in Donetsk region before full-scale invasion. The war in Ukraine started in 2014 actually, and he was there and he was making, not murals, but kind of big, big pieces of art with the… He was mocking this temporary Russian puppet government. And then he was taken to the prison and tortured, and then he actually flee this prison and we had his testimonies. So, actually we had this big range of artists who show this resistance and resilience through the lenses of how you’ve been an artist can react to the situation that is going on in the country.

So, yeah, I think documentary theatre can be really useful as a tool or reconciliation inside society, but also, it’s amazing for cultural diplomacy to bring the stories from the people themselves, and to show them respect and dignity.

Ash: I’ve seen a few of the pieces because there have been pieces done by Ukrainian artists in New York and some of the testimonies to some of the testimonial theatre. I believe some may have been read at the UN. They’ve shared some of that work. I’m curious about the piece that was made for the ICC. Was that performed there? Did people present that at the International Criminal Court?

Veronika: It wasn’t made for ICC. It was made during the work of clinicians that gathered the evidences of crimes against humanity. They gathered testimonies and based on these testimonies and based on this victim story with all the concepts, they made theatre piece and presented it in London.

Ash: Wow.

Veronika: It’s called the Reckoning Project.  I’m not part of the team. I know playwrights, and I know amazing journalists who are working in terms of this criminal court case against Russia.

Ash: Are journalists and theatremakers generally working together in this type of work?

Veronika: In this work, yes. It’s not very common, but I know quite a few projects where journalists made, for instance, amazing investigation around corruption, and they made a theatre piece in Poltava. And in Poltava they had, I think it’s not now… I don’t know if it exists now, but for seven years it was an amazing theatre called theatre of civic dialogue, and they put only pieces that investigated different problems about equality, about feminism, about corruption, et cetera, et cetera, on the stage. And it was really powerful.

Also, here in Ukraine, we made huge projects about Crimean Tatars, Crimea 5AM. I was producer of that project. It was actually, it was really powerful. Since the Crimea occupation in 2013, 2014 Russia was trying to make this international image that it’s actually Russian territory, but it’s not. It’s actually Crimean Tatars’. And during Soviet period in 1984, Crimean Tatars was forcefully relocated to the south of Soviet Union, and more than one hundred thousand of them died during the relocation because it was like one night they put them all in few trains and sent very far away from the homeland to put a lot of Russian people to Crimea.

And then after Ukraine get independent in 1991, a lot of Crimean Tatar decide to go back home to their homeland. And after this new occupation, nowadays, Russia oppressed them very heavily and made peace based on testimonials and interviews with the Crimean Tatar insurgents who remained to stay in Crimea. Yeah, it was very interesting project because a lot of them sentenced from twenty to thirty-five years in prison. It means that families don’t see their fathers. And during the project, we had amazing activists and political activists face this resistance, Crimean resistance. Nerman Gilal, during the project, three months before the huge premier, he was taken to the prison with very false accusation that he exposed something. But in this particular date, he was in Ukraine. And it’s proven, it’s everywhere. It’s seen that he wasn’t there even, but it was just to show how Russian court is actually working.

And yeah, we had to write to him. We tried to send letters through his lawyer to the prison and had his handwritten letter back. So it was very strong, very nice project. It’s actually online. You can see the video of the project. It’s very, very strong.

Ash: Where can listeners see the video?

Veronika: YouTube. It called Crimea 5AM.

Ash: Okay. So, we’ll link that on the podcast so that people can listen to that.

Veronika: It’s amazing English translation, but our translator in the middle of the piece started to cry. And yeah, so we have very emotional English translation of the piece, but it’s amazing. It’s really great.

Ash: Wow. So, if you were listening to this podcast, you can find the link on the HowlRound website, and you can view it. And Crimea 5AM was also, it was a multidisciplinary piece, right? Didn’t it have... You used sound and various other technologies beyond theatre?

Veronika: Everything that I’m trying to do is multidisciplinary. I don’t know how it works, but it’s like my—

Ash: I love it.

Veronika: —idea. In the performance, we used a lot of music from weddings, from different Crimean Tatars rituals, but also, it was text based on interviews. Very carefully worked with our play writers, Anastasia Kosodii and Natalka Vorozhbyt, and it was amazing that they were really tender and precise with everything that’s been spoken. And I was gathering, we had first in Crimea because for us, it’s forbidden to go there. One lawyer, I didn’t think we can name her, she gathered these interviews of families for us. And then she contacted lawyers of prisoners, and we had also their written testimonies and that’s how this play was made. And then it was stage written, made by very amazing and prominent journalists, civic rights activists, actors from Crimea, and et cetera.

And it was very powerful. Also, we use music. We made very nice collaboration with the restaurant of Crimean cuisine, and they brought a lot of nice food. And the idea—we put it like the set design—the author of set design and the director of it is Dmytro Kostiumynskyi. He imagined amazing idea. He made the tent from stripes with the reds and white, this dangerous stripe, the stripe with the caution.

Ash: Gotcha.

Veronika: And from the stripes, it was huge, huge tent. I don’t know, twenty-five meters high, and then very white. And also, we made this huge stage on this whole venue. It was Ukrainian house in the center of Kyiv and the center of the capital. And it was, for us, important that this huge stripe was visible from the Ukrainian parliament, also to bring more attention of Ukrainian government to the situation. But outside of this performance, we had websites. On the website, you can see each story, you can see each person and his family house, his family’s amazing photographs, just great.

After this project of photographer, she was forbidden to go back to Crimea, unfortunately. But yeah, that’s actually how it worked with this amazing work of her. Also, you can see the kind of calculator that’s calculating dates, how many days each of them spent in prison. Yeah, so it’s like one side and another site we published a book, and this book is also very fragile and very emotional with the play, but also, with different thoughts and ideas. And we had amazing visual identity of the project with the black stripes, like prison cage, you can find it all in YouTube or on the website, Crimea 5AM.

Ash: What was your experience producing this piece and creating this piece with so many artists? How did you work with everybody, and how did everybody work together?

Veronika: We had an amazing team and play writers who were amazing and actors who are not actually actors, who are acting on the stage who were reading the text. They were really engaged and we had maybe three rehearsals because most of them were very famous musicians or artists or people. It was only three rehearsals.

But I mean, if you’re talking about documentary theatre, the main case is to make it more direct and clear, the statement. And we had amazing artists. I don’t remember we had any kind of obstacles and problems in this case. And the whole project, by the way, was financed by USAID [United States Agency for International Development], which is we are very grateful for Americans that supported the project that time. It was really great. And it was also great to work with USAID, too.

Ash: That’s great. What was the response from the community after you showed that? Your audience’s responses and the government responses?

Veronika: It was made on the request of Ukrainian Institute, which is part of Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but it’s very small department of this ministry and vice head of this ministry, Alim Aliyev, he’s Crimean Tatar himself. So, for him, it was important. But for us, it was also important. I spent my childhood in Crimea, our director also, his family is from Crimea, but he was born in Kyiv. And we all had some emotional connection to do this project. And yeah, the response was amazing. It was great project, very strong. After that, we translated the text into English, French, German, Polish language, and staged in Warsaw, London, there is Berlin. It’s not staged, like we made stage readings, but also, it’s like the Ukraine Institute find other directors abroad who worked with play writers to translate it properly, and who make their own version of the stage. It’s basically open if you want.

If you have theatre that want to make this project, you can write to Ukrainian Institute and they will share the text, and it’s very possible to organize this event. But I can say, I mean, the idea was to bring more attention to this case, and the project was amazing. The first part of Crimea occupation was very weak response from Europe. And if during this first occupation of Donetsk Oblast region and Crimea, Europe, and America would have react in other way, maybe the war wouldn’t be here. But on other hand, it’s… I don’t know what’s being changed in terms of policies and politics around Crimean Tatar since then.

Ash: I’m so happy to know that it’s available for people, and I’m sure there are listeners who are going to look into that. Regarding documentary theatre’s responses, some criticisms that I’ve heard about documentary theatre from a lot of activist practitioners I’ve interviewed on here is that theatre is not an immediate response, and it takes a while to make work.

And it sounds like you’re making immediate theatre and immediately responding. And I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about your process in doing that, because I feel like that holds a lot of people up— this idea that it’s going to take six months, nine months to develop a piece and then people will have moved on. It sounds like you are making work and it’s an immediate response and people are responding to that.

Veronika: I think it’s very different from country to country and from experience to experience. For instance, here in Ukraine now, we are facing cultural genocide. And if we will not do theatre now, it’s not really clear if we can do it tomorrow. We have a team that worked on relocation of art archives from Kharkiv region, for instance, and it was in parallel with all our projects, but it was very clear understanding if we will not do it now, then no, when we’ll do it tomorrow, we need just to keep it, and to do as much as possible to preserve because everything is shifting so fast.

Ash: What are the next projects that you’re working on or have in progress?

Veronika: Actually, I’m working now mostly on art therapy projects because the request in the society is so huge. We are using multimodal approach in arts and trauma-informed arts to make residencies and retreats programs for kids from frontline territories. It’s hundreds of thousand kids that’s on the frontline territories, and with different reasons they can’t play, and we are working with them. We’re suggesting them emotional release and working with art tools, with documentary film, with theatre, with the performing art to help them to claim back the agency, to show them that they have something inside that they can rely on, and et cetera.

We are thinking about connection between these ecological catastrophes and totalitarian, this, imperialistic approaches that Russia has now in Ukraine, and this project might call Between Earth and Me. It’s also about thinking about soil, ground, territory from different perspective. Earth can be something where you can plant the orchard, but also, it can be somewhere where you dig trenches to fight for your land, or it can be something to bury your closest ones like cemeteries, but it’s all very important.

And it’s not really... When you think about the impact of war, you are thinking about victims, you are thinking about the statistic and data, but you’re not thinking about the soil and earth that can’t be used for grow harvest, for instance, or rivers that has been spoiled. And yeah, it’s another side, but it’s very important side of this war that is happening because the Earth is only one and everything is interconnected. And when Russians exploded the dam in Kherson region, and hundreds of thousands kilometers was just flooded with water because of one idiotic gesture, it has really changed the whole ecosystem, and it lends everything. So, yeah, this idea of the project that we have inside, but we are not there yet to start to work on it.

Ash: That’s so important. And it’s something that is not really discussed here at all in the mainstream about the connection between climate and Earth and war and imperialism. I’m so happy that that’s being done. Please let me know links, or anywhere that we can support this work because it’s so necessary. I don’t think a lot of people are thinking about those connections.

Veronika: It’s only idea so far. We applying to different funds with this project, but I think it could be also prominent performance that can be adjusted anywhere.

Ash: It’s incredible. And your art therapy programs, that’s for young people and people of all ages?

Veronika: We are working with a lot of different vulnerable groups, but we are working also with veterans.

Ash: Oh, great.

Veronika: We’re working in hospitals. We’re working with kids who are on kidney dialysis, or in cancer departments who spend a lot of time in hospitals, but also, we are working with IDP families to restore the connection between parents and kids because parents in a lot of stress and anxiety, they just don’t have this emotional capacity to be good parents. And yeah, we work with a lot of different audiences.

Ash: Wow. Thank you so much for sharing this. Is there anything else you’d like to talk about that you think the listeners would need to hear, or anything about your work that you’d like to add?

Veronika: I think my work is more responsive to the request. The festival that I was making was about rights to the city, how we can claim rights to the city through the arts, through different cultural projects and civic activism. And it was also very responsive to the situation we faced that time, but then the situation shifted and all my work is actually fast respond. And I think the art has its insights, has its ability to respond quickly and at least to try to restore some kind of justice, even if the word justice itself is not really working anymore.

Ash: How can people connect with you, or follow your work?

Veronika: Social media. I’m not really posting on social media. I’m not really a public person anymore. When I was head of the festival I used to be, but now I’m working mostly... We have Art Therapy Force website where it’s also in English, all our activities around art therapy there, but in terms of artistic work, I can say I have strong focus for the moment on that.

Ash: I will link the Art Therapy Force website, and then also links to Crimea 5AM.

Veronika: This project with Zoe was also amazing With Fire and Rage, if you can find the link on the Artist on the Frontlines page. 

Ash: Fire and Rage.

Veronika: It was amazing project.

Ash: Tell me about it.

Veronika: It’s about resistance and resilience of artists from the different life circumstances who decide to act in different way. But the one thing that I love so much in Ukraine, we have very strong embroidery tradition. And in this piece, in this theatre piece WithFire and Rage, we tried to show that it’s not like the word didn’t start yesterday. It’s actually three hundred years of Russian oppression and ideas that Ukraine is colony, and et cetera. And we tried to make this, with Zoe, we tried to make this roots through Ukrainian feminist tradition in the beginning of 19th century, then through our amazing philologist who really proved that Ukrainian language is separated from Russian language. He did it in Canada and he really changed the Slavic history. And we talked about him, about Vasyl Stus, the poet who was killed in Russian prison in 1965 when everyone was thinking that there is no actually murders of artists anymore, but it was also another huge wave of killing Ukrainian artists from Soviet regime.

And then we brought it up to this... We built it through testimonies of people from Mariupol who plead the occupied city. And we had Ala, she’s cultural journalist and she talked about her experience. She lived near the Mariupol drama theatre and she was there actually when drama theatre collapsed and she was talking about her own experience. So, we tried to put this link, how it’s actually connected. And the one thing that I love the most, this embroidery that I started with, we made three big embroidery pieces from Kharkiv street artists. We gathered the stencil arts from just walls on the Kharkiv streets. We made photos, and then we asked another artist to make embroidery. And it was like this huge embroidery stencils that’s usually... Who make embroidery from street art? No one. But it was really nice idea for me, and it was something that maybe can be interesting.

And I think you can find this all images on the Artists on the Frontline website WithFire and Rage project.

Ash: This has been an episode of The Nonfiction Theatre Forum podcast. I’m your host, Ash Marinaccio. This podcast is produced as a contribution to HowlRound Theatre Commons. You can find more episodes of this show and any HowlRound show wherever you find podcasts, including iTunes, Spotify, and non-commercial, open-source apps, like Anytime Podcast Player for iPhone or AntennaPod for Android. Be sure to search “HowlRound Theatre Commons” and subscribe to receive new episodes. If you love this podcast, post a rating and write a review on those platforms. This helps other people find us. You can also find a transcript for this episode, along with a lot of other progressive and disruptive content, on howlround.com. Have an idea for an exciting podcast, essay, or TV event the theatre community needs to hear, visit HowlRound and submit your ideas to the Commons. Think you or someone ought to be on the show? Connect with us through Docbloc and on Instagram, @docblocprojects. That is D-O-C-B-L-O-C. Thank you for joining us at the Nonfiction Theatre Forum.