The Fourth Kyiv in May International Festival ended in the traditional atmosphere of merry hustling and bustling and fireworks marking The Day of Kyiv. Lasting a week and a half, its finale is part of annual spring festivities at the Ukrainian capital that are also very much on the theatrical side. The alternative to Kyiv in May is another kind of game.
I believe that many preferred the legendary Annie Girardeau’s one-woman show, Madame Marguerite, to the squares thundering with decibels, the more so that the performance ended the festival program. Needless to say, Sukhishvili-Ramishvili’s Georgian National Ballet’s concert on Friday May 24 caused a small sensation. Many also attended the chamber renditions of the French Grotesque Theater. The final act, gazing at the stars over the capital, also gathered an appreciative audience.
The results of the festival are still to be summed up. There is no doubt, however, Kyiv in May has its own audience that could be numerically stronger, of course, if our taste for a good theater were formed not by sporadic tours or forums, but by more or less regular events. But this task is beyond the festival’s organizing committee. Oleksiy Kruzhelny and his partners did their best, bringing several good performances to Kyiv, including Rimas Tuminas’s excellent Masked Ball, quite an accomplishment, all things considered.
The next, fifth, sister cities festival will be a jubilee one. The tentative list of participants is very impressive. In the first place, the Maly Theater from St. Petersburg, directed by Lev Dodin. Also, Victoria Chaplin (the immortal Charlie’s daughter) with her company, and the Swedish jazz star Victoria Tolstoy (Leo Tolstoy’s granddaughter), along with the very special Renai Dance Theater of Antique Dancing Etiquette and STOK group, both from Sweden, with the latter having toured Kyiv; Residenz Theater, and Wroclaw’s Theater of Billy Goat Songs... The list is still open and one can only hope that the organizing committee will show enough determination and the sponsors enough magnanimity.
The best result – for the future – would be turning this festival into an as inalienable component of Kyiv’s cultural life as the city’s day. But, as I said, all this remains for the future.
