Famed director Svitlana Oleshko was a pioneer of avant-garde theatre | Canada Voices

It’s sadly fitting that Kharkiv! Kharvkiv! was the last show acclaimed Ukrainian theatre director Svitlana Oleshko would ever direct.

It’s a rollicking musical and an ode to Les Kurbas, an innovative Ukrainian actor, director and playwright whose daring productions in the 1920s and 1930s drew the ire of the country’s Soviet rulers and led to his execution in 1937.

Oleshko loved the works of Kurbas, which touched on many of the themes that guided her 30-year career – the struggle for artistic freedom, the dangers of oppression and the richness of Ukrainian culture.

The musical opened last March and is still running at Warsaw’s Teatr Polski, where Oleshko had been living and working since fleeing her home in Kharkiv shortly after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

She died on Dec. 19 at the age of 51 after a short battle with cancer. She had been a pioneer of modern Ukrainian avant-garde theatre and was widely acclaimed for ridding Ukraine’s stages of dull Soviet dramas after the country gained independence in 1991.

“She was absolutely a Kharkiv person,” said Kateryna Botanova, a culture critic and writer from Kyiv. Oleshko loved “the cultural history and legacy of Kharkiv and its people, specifically the period of the 1920s, which were for a long time lost and forbidden and almost forgotten.”

Oleshko was born in Kharkiv and studied Russian philology at university. She and a group of students co-founded the Arabesky Theatre in 1993. It was the country’s first independent theatre, and under Oleshko’s leadership it began showcasing the works of Ukrainian playwrights, musicians and poets that had been suppressed by the Russians for decades.

She worked closely with her first husband, Ukrainian writer Serhiy Zhadan, and later with actor and musician Mikhail Barbara, whom she married in 2021 after they’d lived together for nearly 20 years.

“It was absolutely clear for us to perform only in Ukrainian language,” she told The Globe and Mail in an interview in 2023. “Every show, every performance, was about, ‘what is Ukrainian theatre?’”

She left Kharkiv in March of 2022 with her sister and her sister’s two children as Russian bombs started falling. They headed to Warsaw at the urging of Andrzej Seweryn, the artistic director of Teatr Polski. He’d known Oleshko for years and invited them to stay in a small flat on the theatre’s sixth floor. He also hired Oleshko to produce shows.

“We were friends,” Seweryn said in an interview. “We had our cultural differences but we trusted her and she trusted us.”

Oleshko never shied away from taking on difficult topics or dealing with raw emotions. Seweryn recalled a show she put on for Teatr Polski several years ago that offered Ukrainian insights into the historic tensions between Poles and Ukrainians, and into the massacre of thousands of Poles by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army during the Second World War.

“It was very important from the political, social, moral and artistic point of view that we Polish people, we Polish artists, could have another point of view about this terrible common history,” he said. “It was a very courageous act from their side, but also from my side that I allowed it because it was very controversial.”

During Oleshko’s recent time at the Teatr, she also offered audiences new perspectives on Ukrainian history and the war with Russia. Besides Kharkiv! Kharvkiv!, she directed plays and readings, and worked on a project to digitize the works of Vasyl Stus, a Ukrainian poet who spent 13 years in Soviet prisons and died in jail at the age of 47 in 1985.

Seweryn plans to save space for Kharkiv! Kharvkiv! in Teatr Polski’s repertoire in honour of Oleshko. “I will keep it. I will defend this performance,” he said.

After Russia’s full-scale invasion, Oleshko spoke openly about her “cold, rational and constructive” hatred of that country. “Hate, it’s the main feeling now for the whole of Ukrainian people,” she told The Globe. “And our hate, I think, helps us think about the future, about our cities, about our countries, about our children. And I think we will see this future without Russians.”

She never recovered from the loss of Barbara, who died from an illness in October, 2021, just months after their wedding, or from being forced to leave Kharkiv, the city she loved. But she remained steadfast that Ukraine would defeat the Russians.

“We will win,” she said. “But I don’t know how long this war will last or when I can be at home.”

Seweryn said Oleshko spent a lifetime proving that Ukrainian art and culture will always survive and thrive.

“We should keep this in our memory, and we should repeat these stories to the entire world, because the world has very short memory,” he said. He added that, “Russian propaganda will do all it can to kill the Ukrainian culture, to make it disappear. But it’s impossible. The Ukrainian culture will exist against all the Russians forces.”