The Maria Festival traditionally takes place on the small stage of the Ivan Franko Theater. The forum is the brainchild of Larysa Kadyrova, a renowned actress and winner of the Shevchenko Prize. She has prepared a gift for the spectators and will present her new work, the production of Tadeusz Rozewicz’s play Stara kobieta wysiaduje (Old Woman Sits Waiting).
The International Maria Theater Festival of Woman’s Monodramas was established in 2004, which marked the 150th anniversary of the birth of the great actress Maria Zankovetska, who focused on inner development in her acting. People of Zankovetska’s talent are born once in a century. Her character, appearance, and personality combined all the qualities that define an artistic person; her deep emotions and inner feelings, owing to other traits of her character, made her performance dynamic, which was reinforced by her expressive appearance, plasticity, and voice.
“The most important thing that takes place in my life in the evening is the performance. Once there is no performance, I simply lack oxygen. Everything is ready! Just give me the footlights and nothing else is left, and you begin to create the show on your own. For me real life begins from the moment when a person acquires the possibility to make choices. Civic, creative, moral life is a result of an effort, like any role. Therefore, knowing the finale, both in life and on stage I do not lie to myself. Perhaps hence comes my maximalism, hyperbole, and negativism,” Zankovetska wrote.
“Not only did she produce images of Little-Russian women, but embodied a woman’s destiny on the whole with all of its peculiarities, pain and joy, hopes and disappointment. Women’s destiny has never found a more accomplished, brighter and more truthful embodiment in art,” reads the extract from the book Women’s Silhouettes, Petersburg, 1912. It contains 16 portraits of the most outstanding women of that time, such as Sofia Kovalevskaya, Eliza Orzeszkowa etc. Three women on the list are actresses, Eleonora Duse, Vera Komissarzhevskaya, and Maria Zankovetska.
Therefore, when establishing the only festival of women’s monodramas on the territory of Ukraine, we aimed to honor the memory of the first People’s Artist of Ukraine, popularize the actress’s global achievements, cultivate and show the opportunities of the theater’s universal language, help actively integrate the Ukrainian theater with the world theater process. Every year the festival is dedicated to some outstanding person of Ukrainian or world culture, such as Mykola Hohol or Gabriel Garcia Marquez. This year it will be Anton Chekhov, whose 150th birth anniversary is celebrated by the entire theater community.
Every year the forum takes place in the Ivan Franko Theater, where the audience is invited to the chamber scene (Foyer Theater). The program includes selected plays from all over the world. All actresses and guests stay for the entire duration of the festival, watch their colleagues performances, listen to literary and theater critics and become an organic part of the living festival infrastructure: watching the performances, roundtable discussions, international conference, attending museums, and excursions in our wonderful capital.
The idea of Theater written in capitals and being a scholarly, research, and laboratory center is dominant at the Maria Festival. This idea has come to us from Europe long time ago, through such people as Jerzy Grotowski, Giorgio Strehler, Peter Brook. Ukraine has a theater studio movement connected with Volodymyr Kychynsky as well as his Les Kurbas Theater, Serhii Danchenko’s motivation filigree, and Anna Babenko’s palette of nuances. I have worked with these different and very talented artists. I think that the most important thing for a director is unrestrained imagination, caused by the serious pondering of eternal questions. Confronted with such opinions, I understand: it is wise not only to experiment in the sphere of theater psychology, but make the performance’s concept be grounded on drama studies.
The Maria Festival always shows dialog between the government and the theater. It is well-funded and nobody intrudes in the creative process. I consider this way to be the most productive in the modern theater context, if we want to exist freely in the intellectual artistic space.
