Reviews 2015
Reviews 2015
✭✭✭✭✩
by Mark Marczyk & Marichka Kudriavtseva, directed by Mark Marczyk
Lemon Bucket Orkestra, St. Vladimir’s Institute, Toronto
January 22-February 1, 2015;
SummerWorks, Great Hall Blackbox Theatre, Toronto
August 10-16, 2015;
296 Broadview Avenue, Toronto
May 26-June 5, 2016
“Heroes Don’t Die”
Counting Sheep is an immersive interactive theatre experience devised by Mark Marczyk and Marichka Kudriavtseva that succeeds brilliantly in transporting its participants into the heart of Kiev at the start of the Ukrainian Revolution of 2014. Marczyk, best known as the front man of the Lemon Bucket Orkestra (LBO), had gone to Ukraine to score a film and arrived on January 22, 2014, the first day when people were killed in protests against the government. He got caught up in the experience of the protestors on Kiev’s central square, the Maidan Nezalezhnosti, known simply as the Maidan, and there met singer and ethnomusicologist Kudriavtseva. Together they wanted to bring their experience to audiences back in Toronto. Since the production can accommodate only 30 people per performance, the run virtually sold out before it opened, but Marczyk and Kudriavtseva hope to remount it. When they do, be sure to see it.
One of Marczyk’s greatest ideas is to represent the sense of community and shared experience in the form a dinner. The $100 ticket price may seem steep*, but it includes a delicious, multi-course traditional Christmas Eve dinner (Свята вечеря) created by gourmet Shamez Amlani of La Palette and chef Dan Ihnatowycz. A percentage of the proceeds go to Patriot Defence: IFAK and Combat Lifesaver Training for Ukraine.
When you enter the theatre at the St. Vladimir’s Institute, you are asked to sit along the long sides of a T-shaped table in the middle of space empty except for a large Christmas tree surmounted with the Ukrainian trident or “Tryzub” (Тризуб), the symbol of Ukraine on the country’s coat of arms. The table is made of grey rectangular sections alternating with wooden rectangular sections painted with various symbols of Ukraine such as St. Vladimir and Serhiy Nihoyan, a 21-year-old, who was the first person killed in the Maidan. A screen covers the stage opening and on the screen and on the north and south walls of the auditorium, a montage of news accounts of the Maidan revolution plays in a loop.
After all the guests have arrived at the table, Marczyk and Kudriavtseva supply a brief introduction to the evening in English and Ukrainian. Then to the sounds of folksongs, the a cloth is symbolically laid on the table, the table is set and the meal begins. News clips, all taken from YouTube as Marczyk admits, outline the background of the conflict. The act that began the protests occurred in November 2013 when Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych decided, under pressure from Russia, not to sign a free trade agreement with the European Union and to choose closer ties with Russian instead. Yanukovych’s decision clashed with the majority of Ukrainians who has hoped for closer ties with Europe leading eventually membership in the EU. Protests in the Maidan began on November 21, 2013, rising to up to 800,000 people on the weekends of December 1 and 8 – hence the presence of the Christmas tree and the Svjata Vecherja.
Before we know it, actors clad as the Berkut (Бéркут), the special police force of the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs, appear on the stage and demand that the celebrations stop and that we disperse. It is now February 18, the day of the first violent clashes between the police and the protesters leading to the deaths of at least 82 protesters. We’re herded to the east end of the auditorium and the Berkut tear off the tablecloth so ceremoniously placed there earlier. We now discover that the tabletop itself consisted of shields, grey for the Berkut and the those painted with Ukrainian motifs for the protesters. The Berkut rap their shields with their batons exactly in time with those in the videos. The lights are doused and in a series vivid, briefly illuminated tableaux, Marczyk stages a battle between the Berkut and the protesters. Marczyk has a fine eye for a single widely resonant action. He shows us a Berkut officer put down his rifle, take off the jacket of his uniform and reach out a hand to a protester who helps him over the table to the protestors’ side. We realize that the police are, after all, Ukrainians, who have been forced to fight against fellow countrymen. After this we find we are with the protesters who ask us to help in building a barricade against the stage made up of the tables and chairs we had just been using along with tires rolled in from outside.
From this point on we are so involved with our own participation inside the auditorium that we forget to look at the videos. If we do, however, we see that, as before, what we are doing exactly mimics film shot at the scene. Once the barricades are built a period of relative peace descends and the main course of the meal is served cafeteria style as if we were living behind the barricades. There are canapés, meat courses, pirogies, grains. Music from the LBO and songs and dancing start up again. Life goes on despite the disruptions and the videos show people even getting married during this period.
Once the main courses are finished, we realize the ceasefire will not hold. Teargas in the form of stage fog streams out from the stage side of the barricades. Grenades or Molotov cocktails in the form of streamers fly over our heads from the eastern balcony to the Berkut standing on the stage at the west. The Berkut begin firing their rifles, the bullets wonderfully reconceived as black paper airplanes. Eventually, a male protester is wounded and a female Red Cross volunteers keens as she holds him, realizing there is nothing she can do. The singers enter intoning Ukrainian liturgical chant and wrapping up the dead man in the what had been the tablecloth of our dinner.
This scene, “Heroes Don’t Die” (“Герої не вмирають”) is the most emotional of the evening as protesters carry out his body upon which we cast roses, just as the people in the videos cast roses into the coffins of the dead in the Maidan. Some audience members are overcome with weeping. After the mourners return they lead us onto the stage where the screen has been torn down and four actors as protesters with beautiful symbolism enact their deaths, overturning bowls of earth on the tablecloth from which we had previous eaten. All the while the liturgical music continues until the mourners and musicians leave and we are led off the stage.
Counting Sheep is an overwhelming experience. The music from the LBO is boisterous and wild and sums up the joy of living. The songs under Kudriavtseva range from earthy full-throated folksongs and carols to finely tuned liturgical music sung with exquisite harmonies. We have a picture of civilized life as a dinner, interrupted, but which continues despite everything and finishing much like a reception at the end of a funeral where we, who were once strangers, have now been united by a common loss. The genius of Marczyk’s staged event is to find complex symbolism in everyday objects and to see the universality of the Ukrainian Revolution while still emphasizing its specificity.
Almost every member of the audience had some connection to Ukraine. I do not but I had followed what happened then and follow what is happening now closely because of its greater international significance. Those without a Ukrainian connection or knowledge of the situation might easily feel at sea during the show. It’s possible the show is not intended for them, but if Marczyk and Kudriavtseva wish to widen their potential audience, a projected chronology of the events being depict would not go amiss.
Marczyk and Kudriavtseva succeed in creating such a vivid world inside the auditorium that it is disorienting to step outside the building into the safety and calm of Toronto because what you carry with you now is the visceral, unforgettable feeling of what it was like somewhere where the security we take for granted has been overturned.
*The tickets price for the August presentations is $25 for the main floor, $15 for the upper floor.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: Promotional photo for Counting Sheep; Mark Marczyk and Marichka Kudriavtseva, ©2015 Carlos M. Gárate. Scene from Counting Sheep, ©2015 Marichka Melnyk.
For tickets, visit www.countingsheepkoljada.com or http://summerworks.ca.
2015-01-31
Counting Sheep