Ten puppet theaters from various cities of Ukraine took part in the festival. The sky was the limit where genres and plots were concerned, and the jury members watched a broad variety of performances. There were both puppets and live actors on stage, and traditional as well as experimental productions.
The jury was headed by Serhii Yefremov, the artistic director of the Kyiv City Puppet Theater, who is the president of the Ukrainian branch of the Union Internationale de la Marionnette (UNIMA) and a lecturer at the Department of Acting and Directing in Puppet Theaters at Karpenko-Kary Theater University in Kyiv.
The festival included the roundtable “Development Problems Faced by Professional Puppet Theaters: Personnel Training in Ukraine.” The main issue today is improving puppeteers’ skills, as many actors often lack professional training. Roundtable participant Oleksandr Kutsyk, the chief director of the Lviv Puppet Theater, emphasized that this problem was very noticeable during the festival.
Today many puppet theaters are increasingly rejecting puppets in favor of live actors. This is easier, for one thing, and second, craftsmen who make puppets in Ukraine are far and few in between. Puppets used to be shipped in from St. Petersburg, and the puppet college in Odesa cannot keep up with demand.
The jury conferred the award for Best Direction on Kutsyk’s production Where’s the Fifth One? Director Mykhailo Ovsiannykov won the Best Production award for his play The Grouch (Dnipropetrovsk). The prize for Best Supporting Role went to Oleksandr Kocherhin (Lviv), and designer T. Ulinets snagged the award for Best Puppet.
The Rivne Puppet Theater captivated audiences with its production of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, directed by Volodymyr Podtserkovny. The play was richly imaginative, with its brilliant color palette of puppets and live actors, innovative direction, colorful costumes, professionally balanced cast, and live music. The Rivne company also staged an interesting musical (composer: Valerii Marchenko) which won three nominations: Best Music Score, Best Male Supporting Role (Stanislav Lozovsky), and Best Festival Production.
The Rivne company’s triumph may be explained by the fact that its director Volodymyr Danyliuk is the only one with a special education. He is a graduate of the Kyiv Theater University’s Faculty of Theatrical Organization and Planning. He was originally trained to be a production designer, and he defended his diploma work, The Snow Queen, at the Mariinsky Theater.
Danyliuk says that the director of a puppet theater must not only know how to obtain funds for production as well as repairs of the theater building, but also have artistic taste and an understanding of the creative process.
The question of repertoire is a very painful problem for puppet theaters. Today many are forgetting about the classics, although this is the only way to raise the younger generation properly.
The Zaporizhia-based puppet theater staged Lesia Ukrainka’s The Forest Song (directed by Oleksandr Kuzmin). Even though the jury thought the production had shortcomings in terms of clarity of plot and conceptual accents, the audience received it very warmly. (The Forest Song won the Best Set Design award; designer: Liudmyla Zinovieva). There was a real fairy-tale forest on stage, and the play was spectacular and dynamic.
In addition to the professional jury, there was also a children’s jury headed by Svitlana Yemets, the artistic director of Sviia Studio. The young judges singled out Brer Rabbit’s Antics, a play for schoolchildren staged by the company from Kryvyi Rih, while The Forest Song won in the high school standing.
Today all of Ukraine’s puppet theaters, except those in Kyiv, Poltava, and Luhansk, are based in premises that are ill-equipped for this art. The acoustics in these halls are inadequate, and the number of seats far exceeds design specifications (as a rule, these are former “Houses of Young Pioneers” and “Houses of Culture”). Their lighting equipment has long outlived its service life, so actors are often forced to perform in semidarkness, and children in the audience can hardly make out what’s happening on stage.
But Ukraine’s puppeteers are optimists and, for the most part, dedicated entertainers. This means that there will be new and interesting productions in which these actors will have encounters with the most appreciative audiences in the world - children. This is the most gratifying aspect of their work.
