Also interesting is a project I worked on with Home of Sound, an institution dedicated to the medium of sound and modern art. We created an art therapy audio tour to help soldiers returning from the front lines. We wanted to help them to adapt again to civilian life because it’s very hard for them. In their minds, they are still there in the battlefields.
We created this audio tour based on interviews with soldiers, with veterans. The author of the tour was Pavlo Yurov, who’s serving now in the army. So, it’s a case of a soldier writing about soldiers and veterans. But some of the veterans told us that this content needed to be done not for them alone, but also for civilians, because they wanted civilians to hear this, to know what and how they feel. This project was not only a therapeutic tool, but it was also a kind of bridge between soldiers and rest of society.
Laura: I want to be able to picture the audio walk. We’d love to hear just what that is and how it works.
Andrii: It begins as we hear several soldiers communicating among themselves, sharing stories about their experience, and sharing comments about the civilian life they see all around them, remembering what happened to them when they were at the front line.
We wanted to make this audio tour useful to everyone. It is divided into eight episodes. We published these episodes like a music album on Bandcamp, with an instruction manual. Everyone can go to this webpage, read the menu, and see a map with the route. A point one, you play the first episode. At point two, you press play for episode two, and so on.
The idea is to give veterans some kind of ritual, a rite that will allow them to feel they are no longer there but already here—a peaceful exit from the horrible things that they were going through. Soldiers are telling us this a big problem now. Not all that many soldiers are actually returning because the war is still going on. Those who return, for example, may have injuries. We believe that, over time, there will be more and more such people, so we must be ready. We must do something now, not wait.
Laura: Now Iryna will make her presentation.
Iryna: Thank you for inviting me. I want to tell you more about the difficulties we have been experiencing since 2014. Right now, I’m showing a picture of a school in Popasna, in the east of Ukraine. You see how a shell has hit it. This was our first impression when the war began in 2014.
After our Revolution of Dignity in 2014, we mounted The Diaries of Maidan by Natalka Vorozhbyt, which was based on interviews that many of us had done, at the Franko National Theatre in Kyiv. During the Maidan Revolution in 2014, many playwrights came to Maidan Square where they literally recorded or witnessed what was going on. We realized that we could preserve this history.
The first show about displaced people in our own community was Gray Zone, created by my colleagues from Post Play Theatre. I wrote the second, Zlatomisto (or The Golden City), which was a production of our Theatre of Contemporary Dialogue in Poltava. It has been shown throughout Ukraine over forty times. After one performance of this production in 2015 in Dnipro, one teenager said, “I didn’t know what war is before your show.” Now, of course, Dnipro has largely been evacuated. It is terrible, but it is fact.
