The Ivan Honchar Museum has hosted a meeting with Bohdan Beniuk, a popular Ivan Franko Theater and Beniuk and Khostikoiev theatrical company actor. It is the My Ukraine international charitable foundation that has initiated this kind of communication with well-known actors, musicians, and writers. The master-class format allows one to see the true nature of the “star” that has come to “confess” to the spectator.
“I come from a picturesque Ivano-Frankivsk region village,“ Beniuk says. “My mother was born in Lviv oblast and father in the Stanislav (now Ivano-Frankivsk) region. My parents met and got married in Germany, where they had been deported to as slave labor. In 1945, on their way home, two border guard officers stopped them and asked where they hailed from. It turned out that they were from the ‘most Banderaite’ regions. ‘Siberia is waiting for you,’ the officers said. What saved my parents was that mother had already been pregnant. Seeing this, one of the officers said to the other: ‘Look, she’s pregnant. Let them go home.’ Mother died almost five years ago. I would categorically reject all that she was once saying to me. And after I had turned 30, many of the things mother used to say began to come up inside me. At 50, when I indulged my own grandchildren, I began to ponder on how ‘gramps Bohdan’ (as my grandson Severyn calls me) should behave in one situation or another so that the grandchildren do not have to pay for family mistakes. My lineage consists of industrious people who worked very hard from generation to generation in order to give their children (including me) a decent future.
“We were told at the Theatrical Institute that once you’ve read all of Stanislavsky’s works, you have taken the first step towards to knowing the profession. I read Stanislavsky all right! But I failed to take in even one word of all that I had read, so I thought it was all over now and I was no actor. But when I began to tread the boards and meet actors, I began to understand what the actor’s job is. I remember the late theater producer Volodymyr Ohloblin saying: ‘My little Bohdan, you’ve got a performance to play tomorrow. When you go to bed tonight, run off the text in your head, and everything will be as fresh as it can be in your memory all day long tomorrow.’ I tried to take his advice, but I would fall asleep on the very first page of the text. Then I would awake in the morning and think: I am no actor again! This method proved unsuitable for me. But I saw in the course of time that there were other ways, too. There are neither ‘well-trodden’ paths nor any cut-and-dry formulas of success in the theater. There are only tiny fractions scattered around the truth. And when you pick them up, you shape your own frame of professionalism.”
We will remind The Day readers that the pop group Haidamaky will be the next hero of the Art Class project. You can meet the musicians in February, March will gratify audiences with a master class by the singer Nina Matvienko, and in April and May the Honchar Museum will host meetings with the designer Andre Tan and Bohdan Stupka, artistic director of the Ivan Franko Theater, respectively. To attend the soiree of one of these stars, one should turn to the museum or the booking office of the Black Square improvised theater located at the House of the Artist.
