Glasgow Theatre Seminar: Dr Iryna Borysiuk on contemporary Ukrainian drama
Glasgow Theatre Seminar: Dr Iryna Borysiuk on contemporary Ukrainian drama
School of Culture and Creative Arts
Date: Monday 23 September 2024
Time: 13:30 - 15:00
Venue: Meeting Room 123b, Gilmorehill Halls
Category: Academic events
Speaker: Dr Iryna Borysiuk
Website: glasgowtheatreseminar.wordpress.com/
In this talk, Dr Iryna Borysiuk will offer an overview of contemporary Ukrainian drama, considering the position of different generations of playwrights.
Contemporary Ukrainian drama is much less fortunate than Ukrainian poetry and even Ukrainian prose, not only because of the natural gap between a text and its theatrical embodiment, but also because of the dramatic gap between the time the text was written and its publication. This was due to the censorship of literature in the late Soviet period and the parallel existence of officially sanctioned literature and underground self-publishing. This is why some of the plays by the older generation of playwrights can only be read in the context of the time and culture in which they were written, and not in the context of their publication after Ukraine's independence. The absurdity of Soviet reality, conveyed through the clichéd language of the characters, ritualised communication and the functionality of social roles, is the subject of sarcastic reflection in Volodymyr Dibrova's plays. The colourful surzhyk and swearing in Les Podereviansky's plays should be seen as counter-discursive practices that undermine official narratives and the sterilised language of official communication. Signs pointing to the Soviet reality as a prison appear through the conditional and symbolised time-space of Oleh Lyseha's play.
While reinterpretations of classical plays and stage adaptations of prose texts predominate over productions of plays by contemporary playwrights, there are several new interesting and recognisable authors in Ukrainian drama. The younger generation of playwrights is working intensively with traumatic experiences and colonial traumas, re-reading history and working with memory in different ways. The Chernobyl disaster, the Holodomor, the Afghan war, and the problem of national reconciliation after Ukraine's Independence are reflected upon in the plays of Natalia Vorozhbyt, Neda Nezhdana, and Pavlo Arie. The talk will also consider how the current war is reflected in contemporary plays, such as Natalia Vorozhbyt's Bad Roads and Serhiy Zhadan's Bread Truce, or Vorozhbyt's play Green Corridors, dedicated to the experience of Ukrainian refugees abroad.
Dr Iryna Borysiuk is Associate Professor at the Volodymyr Department of Literature, National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. Scholar interests include contemporary Ukrainian poetry, issues of literature and identity, and the construction the subjectivity in literary texts. Her latest publications in English include 'Characters and Masks: Counter-Discursive Strategies in the Poetry of Yurii Andrukhovych' (2023), 'Postcolonial identity in Yurii Andrukhovych’s poetry: landscapes and dislocation' (2019) and 'History as Trauma: Death, Violence, and Loss in the Poetry of Taras Mel’nychuk' (2019). Borysiuk is an author of short stories for teenagers, and her play The Voice won UA/UK Radiodrama competition in 2018. This presentation is kindly supported by Universities UK International (UUKi).