Irma Vitovska-Vantsa Explores Tragicomedy of War in Exclusive Interview

Our life is a tragicomedy, where we get used to pain, can choose a comfortable position, and have achievements alongside tragedies. Irma Vitovska-Vantsa, a theater and film actress and public figure, spoke about the emotional swings in the play, the beginning of the full-scale invasion, and the culture of the 2000s. Watch the full version and read the shortened version of the exclusive interview about anger, despair, and fears.

You have brought a play to Odesa that is about the experience of the beginning of a full-scale invasion, but this is not clear from the title or the poster. Did you encounter any dissonance in the audience's expectations?

What is a Kyiv perepichka? It's just an ordinary sausage in dough. But they know how to make the dough so that it is very tasty and successful. It seems to me that it's not about gastronomy anymore, but about emotion. And perepichka is an emotional story of attachment to Kyiv.

Why Kyiv perepichka? Because it is one of the symbols of this play, an emotion. And the story began with it before the full-scale invasion began on February 8, 2022, but we move with it right into the invasion. And then the events of 2022 and the summer of 2023.

But this period is an autobiographical story. There is a lot of laughter here, despite all the horror. Because in life, this humor is somewhat self-ironic, evil, and somewhat filled with internal revenge. There's some profanity here, because... I don't understand how you can talk about today without using profanity. If it is emotional, if it is not rational, but emotional.

There was a lot of tenderness, tenderness, and sadness that we experienced when we were huddled together, when we entered this blackout, when the elevators were not working, when there was no way to cook. We were shining our flashlights, and they were shining our hearts, dreams, hopes, resentments, anger, and the way we got to know the war.

Most of the country got acquainted with the war in 2022. Because since 2014 it was only a local story. The rest of the country was in its own bubble. The active part understood what was happening and helped. This first shock came. And then, when the ongoing story began, most people focused on their everyday lives.

Some people immediately got into hell, like Mariupol, Avdiivka, Bakhmut, Soledar, Siverskodonetsk and many others. Some people got into the occupation, where almost nothing is destroyed, but they are destroyed inside. What is destroyed is that you have to live in another country if you are not an adherent of those tastes and worldviews.

That is, if this is not a welcome story for you, it is an absolute horror. Some people got into real horror, in addition to moral horror, physical horror. We all got acquainted with war through experience. Now we are more cynical, we have learned to listen, to distinguish by sounds. And in 2022? We thought that this drone was watching only you. We thought that this drone had eyes, it hunted for places with light. The lights were turned off. Even in western Ukraine, the power was turned off because drones were flying. And we were all afraid.

As scary as it may sound, people adapt to the most terrible situations. We no longer cry at deaths, we have more anger and revenge than despair. We have more questions to the sky. How much longer should this go on and how did it happen? And why is this happening?

This is tragic for us. We do not know the answer to how long it will last. I think it will be very long. Because they are also saving up for themselves, we are pluses and they are minuses. I see a very deplorable situation with the future of the federation. In general. It will be very hard on individual nations, who are all connected by blood in this bubble, like everyone else. And for us, there are advantages.

But we are paying for these advantages with blood now. They will be later, we are now. And for us it is always a question of how long it will last. So, of course, the distance of the war has distanced us in emotions. I remember a family in Odesa, where a little girl Kira and her mother died, and her father went to war and died too. For me, these things are postponed. I remember three children in Lviv, children in Kryvyi Rih, these photos, the fear. For me, children's deaths are still extraordinary. The military are also someone's children. I have a lot of lost children of my friends. How do you live with that? And some of them are missing, and I don't know how they live. They are howling.

And you don't know how to share it, to take some of the pain for yourself to make it a little easier. Because the unknown is something worse, I think, than when you bury someone and you know the place where you can come.

Photo: Intent/Natalia Dovbysh

And actually, I created this "Perepichka" from a distance after the invasion began. Because if I had released it in 2022, it probably wouldn't have been as reflective. I needed this distance. It would not have had so much humor inside. In order to create a therapeutic project, you need to go through reflection, take some time to realize it, rethink it, and look at it from the outside. Then it works.

In 2022, I couldn't have made such a joke. But now I can do it from a distance. "Kyivska Perepichka," as Natalka Vorozhbyt herself wrote in a press release, is a seesaw, from one emotion to another, from laughter to tears. In principle, this is how life is. Tragicomedy is our life. Sometimes you cry at a wedding. Sometimes you start laughing at a funeral. It is always unpredictable.

I think we made the right choice when we wrote it from a distance. I think we came out at the right time, when the first days of shock can be therapeutically dealt with. On the other hand, we are mobilizing people on the feelings of the beginning of the war, the whole country was mobilized to go through this road. And it works too.

Nowadays, the 2000s are remembered in the context of the heyday of Ukrainian music, at least in music. "Lesya + Roma was released in 2005. Did you see this surge and what was it based on?

They appeared on a wave. It was Yushchenko, the Orange Revolution. There was a revival in its wake. Then there was a decline, when Yanukovych came in, and the occupation of the information space began again. It was a Russian business-no one was allowed in. Almost all the stars changed to singing in Russian. Only a few sang in Ukrainian, apparently there was some kind of quota. A few survived this period and had access to the airwaves.

For example, Okean Elzy. They were so unique that they entered and were commercially attractive even on tour in Russia. But for the majority, it was a political issue.

Photo: Intent/Natalia Dovbysh

"Lesya + Roma is a pop project of its generation. I thought that we would be bombarded with this pop. But we were told that no one would allow it anymore, because it started working for identity. Because in the East and South, young people began to watch, react, and sympathize. Children who went to school grew up with this. It started to become a cult, it scared them. They even saw the danger of a common identity in pop entertainment content.

What is a common identity? It's a marker. We specifically labeled ourselves as a Ukrainian family, we had multilingual characters, we spoke Russian and surzhik, and we spoke very cool Ukrainian, we had a certain social base and position. You could still feel where it was happening and who these people were.

If the quota hadn't been passed in 2016, we wouldn't have seen any music, and many bands would not have survived that time. And look after the quotas, how many bands got access to the airwaves and we saw them. It's the same with TV content. We were a little late, I can tell you that on February 23, 2022, we were still filming in Russian.

I think it was a mistake, we entered the war with muddy boots. Many actors apologized later. After 2014, only a few refused to work in Russian. Me, Zyubina, well, there are actors who have worked a lot, but they haven't gotten dirty. Ada Nikolaevna took a stand. A lot of actors took a stand, but in quantitative terms, it's very few, I don't want to blame them, everyone has their own arguments.

It was a financial motivation, not an ideological one, but sometimes money can be a little bit fetid, you know. And the state promoted the continuation of this Russian-speaking, the actors were just looking for a place to realize themselves. And there are fewer questions to them than to the system. But that's why they apologized. I did not see any apologies from the producers of the channels. I haven't seen them apologize, but I have seen the actors apologize, and that's worthy.

Марія Литянська