Sept. 3, 2025, 10:35 p.m.
(Drama sprint. PHOTOS: Iryna Derkach)
From August 15 to 17, Kharkiv hosted the Drama Sprint festival, which promotes contemporary Ukrainian drama in theaters in frontline cities. The festival was organized by the Kharkiv-based Zhuky Theater, directed by playwright and co-founder Dmytro Ternovyi, and managed by playwright Iryna Harets.
This is the third edition of the festival. For the first two years, it was held in Kyiv at the Dramaturg Theater. Over the three days of the festival, there were stage readings of the winning plays, a presentation of the Drama Panorama collection, master classes, and discussions.
The festival was attended by representatives of the theater community from the frontline cities of Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Mykolaiv, Odesa, Dnipro, Chernihiv, and Sumy regions.
The workshops included classes by Dmytro Zakhozhenko, the chief director of the Lesya Ukrainka Theater in Lviv, and Tamara Trunova, the chief director of the Kyiv-based Theater on the Left Bank, who spoke about working with contemporary drama. Maryna Kotelenets, executive director of the All-Ukrainian League of Authors, explained the legal aspects of copyright, and Maksym Kurochkin, a military man and playwright, shared his experience of working at the Veterans' Theater in Kyiv.
PHOTO: Iryna Derkach
The peculiarity of this year's program is that six of the eight winning authors are military men. In addition, the festival presented the second volume of the Drama Panorama 2024 anthology, which includes eight winning texts from five competitions at once: Contemporary Play Week, July Honey, Eurodram, TAW, and the Short Drama Competition.
Among them are New York, +38 by Oleksandr Zhuhan, Military Mom and Balance by Alina Sarnatska, Ghosts in the Branches by Valeriy Puzik, Paraskeva by Olga Matsyupa, Bird in the Attic by Oleg Mikhailov, Maa, It Hurts! by Yurko Vovkohon and Hryhoriy Semenchuk, and Bunker. I'm not afraid of anything anymore by Bohdan Adamenko. Six of these eight works were written by the military.
PHOTO: Iryna Derkach
Holding the festival in Kharkiv, a city that lives under shelling every day, was a matter of principle for the organizers, especially for Dmytro Ternovyi, director and co-founder of the Kharkiv Theater on Zhuky.
According to him, after two Kyiv festivals, the team decided to change their approach and expand their geography. In Kyiv, the format of stage readings will not surprise anyone, but in frontline cities it can be a real discovery. This practice used to exist in Kharkiv, but in recent years it has virtually disappeared. Therefore, the festival became not only an artistic event, but also a way to bring this theatrical tradition back to the city.
Ternovyi admits that he personally insisted on Kharkiv: He is a Kharkiv resident and wanted his hometown to become a platform for the development of contemporary drama. The decisive argument was the support of the Renaissance Foundation's grant program for frontline regions. As a result, representatives of theaters from eight cities - Odesa, Mykolaiv, Kherson, Sumy, Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia, Chernihiv, and Kharkiv - came to Kharkiv.
But the festival in Kharkiv is only the first step. The organizers plan to continue the series of readings in these cities, negotiating further cooperation with local theaters. Thus, Drama Sprint becomes not a single event, but a network that unites the theater community of the frontline regions.
The director also emphasized the special role of theater in times of war. It can be a therapy for people, a spiritual support, and at the same time a cultural weapon. Ukrainian drama is creating a new product that spreads national culture, and later should reach the international level.
"The main thing is that this is Ukrainian culture, which is growing as a value and becoming the foundation of our identity," emphasized Dmytro Ternovyi.
Dmytro Ternovyi. PHOTO: Iryna Derkach
He recalled the spring of 2022, when in bombed-out Kharkiv, puppet theater actors went down into the subway and performed for people who had been living underground for weeks. Even then, it became obvious that culture is no less necessary for humans than food.
"This turns Maslow's pyramid upside down: cultural needs were among the basic ones, they became a necessity," the director noted.
Another topic of the festival is new military drama. It emerges from the personal experience of military men who started writing texts. Six of the eight plays in this year's program were created by them. This is not only a new subject matter, but also a new style that breaks the usual canons and goes beyond the classical forms. According to Ternovyi, this is a kind of avant-garde that changes the very nature of Ukrainian theater.
An example is the story of Alina Sarnatska, who wrote a play for the first time and immediately won three prestigious competitions. The director called this success unprecedented for Ukrainian drama.
The festival aims not only to present new texts, but also to "infect" local theaters with contemporary drama. Many of them still rely on archaic repertoire, but contemporary works can change the situation.
"Contemporary drama is already a factor that cannot be avoided. It will either enter the theater, or the theater risks being left out of life," concluded Dmytro Ternovyi.
They use profanity, scream, receive feedback, die and come back to life. They find themselves in the afterlife, in a hospital, during the Second World War, under occupation, different characters in different circumstances. They talk about what they experienced at the front, how they got to the war, how they lost their friends, what they dreamed of, what they hoped for, their disappointments and sadness. They recall the past, talk about the present, and look into the future.
On stage during these three days, the actors presented performative readings of the winning plays of various competitions. Performative readings for the theater union are an opportunity to understand and find the best drama for realization. From this, a full-fledged production grows.
Today, the most pressing topic that runs through our lives is war. Is it possible to convey this horror, the emotions of the military, the pain they experience every day on stage?
There is a white screen in the background of the stage. Every time there are photographs, texts, shadow theater, everything that can touch the viewer, complement the story that is so difficult to tell. Sometimes it seems that they are all from another dimension. It is summer now. In Lviv, crowds are sitting in coffee shops, in Odesa, sunbathing by the sea, in Kharkiv, walking in the park with their children in the evening. It seems that the war only reminds you of itself through air raids, deaths of people you know nothing about, and the news. This is how human thinking works. Death is always about someone else. But here, on stage, in the basement of one of Kharkiv's art spaces, the war was felt in full.
There are several levels to the acting profession. An actor not only has to understand what he or she is doing onstage and why, but also has to convey it to the audience. When an actor goes deep, you will feel it and stay there forever with them. Every look, movement, word will take on a special meaning. At that moment, the actor doesn't exist, he or she stops playing a role and lives on stage. It's exhausting. It's almost impossible. But this is the only way to what is called art.
PHOTO: Iryna Derkach
No special effect can replace this action. But in order for this action to finally happen, the actors must understand why they are on stage. To tell a story, or to introduce some new meanings, to make the conventional viewer think.
All the readings were plays about the war. Each of them had its own goal, its own purpose. But I was most impressed by the last performance of The Bird in the Attic by Oleg Mikhailov. It was about a thirteen-year-old girl from Mariupol. She was torn away from her mother, her hometown was destroyed, and she was taken to Russia, and now they want her to become one of them. For almost two hours, one actress on stage kept not only the audience, but also the experts in her field in suspense.
In this case, the actress not only understood what she was doing on stage and why, she communicated it to the audience. For me, in the acting profession, you choose either the stage or life. Dramaturgy (especially everything related to literature) never forgives falsity, contrivance, hypocrisy. The word in drama is the main weapon, everything else is scenography. But in this case, on stage, both the word and the action merged into one, and became a real performance.
PHOTO: Iryna Derkach
These three days were the discovery of a new world of theater for me, where drama became a living instrument of testimony to war crimes, our present, our struggle. Time will tell how contemporary theater will grow in Ukraine. And our task is to become the audience it so desperately needs.
Анна Бальчінос