projects
curated projects
10 things everyone should know about Ukraine
The joy of having one foot in academia and the other on firmer ground is in being able to carry my passions between two worlds. A project I conceived and produced for the Ukrainian Institute London allowed me to do just that: help shape the fantastic academic research about people and subjects I care about into a form that can be digested both inside and outside of academia.
'10 Things Everyone Should Know About Ukraine' are short films that bring to life ten familiar and yet unknown stories including that of the serf who became an artist and a poet; a writer who rewrote European classics from a woman’s point of view, a theatre director who thought that revolutionary art could change the world, a count who chose to become a priest, an author who wrote more than 300 poems in his prison cell, and film directors who gave a voice to the silenced. They tell the stories of Ukraine as a battleground of murderous regimes fighting over the territory and its people, Ukraine as a melting pot of languages and cultures each influencing one another, Ukraine as a place where revolutions happen in order to bring about peace, Ukraine of many stories told in many voices.
Producer/Director: Nicola Roper | Producer: Olesya Khromeychuk | Researcher: Maria Montague | Archivist: Serhiy Zakharchenko.
'Ukraine at 30'
How do you know that you love your homeland properly? Why would a war draw you back to the place you tried to escape in peacetime? What does it mean to inhabit a language that comes with political baggage? Three women authors who were born just before their country’s rebirth reflect on belonging, identity, and displacement. Olesya Khromeychuk, Sasha Dovzhyk, and Iryna Shuvalova come from different parts of Ukraine — west, southeast, and centre — but their texts are replete with shared experiences. All three left Ukraine to live elsewhere, but their essays are declarations of uneasy love for the country they left behind. Read these essays in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
theatre
molodyi Teatr London
Molodyi Teatr London
Molodyi Teatr London has made me feel happy, frustrated and simply alive. We started as a group of friends eager to create together, and ended up writing our own documentary shows. We began with Ukrainian-language adaptations of works by famous Ukrainian writers including Mykola Hohol’ (Nikolai Gogol), Taras Shevchenko, and contemporary Ukrainian poets, before moving on to documentary pieces on subjects like the Holodomor (famine of 1932-33) and the 2013-14 Maidan protests.
In 2014, we staged our first full-length English-language show, Bloody East Europeans, a cabaret-style musical satire on British attitudes to Eastern Europeans. It was long-listed for Amnesty International’s Freedom of Expression Award. We continued to explore the themes of migration in our next show, Penetrating Europe, or Migrants Have Talent. In our latest show, All That Remains, we told the story of loss in Russia's war against Ukraine.
Photos: Penetrating Europe, or Migrants Have Talent (2017) and Bloody East Europeans (2015) by Guy Corbishley.