A rambunctious super-charged puppet cabaret from Kyiv

Trolls prowl and conflicts rage in online propaganda. External actors force themselves across borders precipitating an icy hot international stalemate. Thousands take to the streets demanding transparency and change.

This is the context for TseSho?/What’s That?, a super-charged puppet cabaret of real time events and Facebook feeds, iconic Ukrainian poetry, catchy vamps, and improvised action. Rambunctious and audacious, the piece questions through the intense lens of childhood. How do we understand? Who are we in a time of sensationalized information and deceptive surfaces? Where is our place in our world and in history? What’s That?

A production of the breakthrough Teatr-Pralnia (Laundry Theater) with Ukraine’s leading contemporary hub, CCA Dakh, directed by theatrical disruptor, Vlad Troitsky.

“We join some opposite things, such as something important and something simple, specific and general, little and great, such as heart and mind, such as theater and laundry. We act and we are ourselves. We ask questions to wash souls, to clean hearts, to freshen minds.”

 Teatr-Pralnia

U.S. DEBUT with center stage

On Tour September 26-November 3 2018

tour overview

Gainesville, FL - September 28-October 3

• Teatr-Pralnia with CCA Dakh started their Center Stage tour with a residency at the University of Florida Performing Arts. They were hosted for a reception with the local Ukrainian community, held a workshop with UFL students, and spent many hours in tech rehearsal preparing their piece TseSho/What's That?.
• The group premiered their puppet cabaret on October 2nd and 3rd at UFL's Squitieri Studio. 

Bethlehem, PA - October 4-7

• The group started two weeks in Pennsylvania with Touchstone Theatre Company in Bethlehem. They performed on October 5th and 6th.

Pittsburgh, PA - October 8-13

• Making their way through a couple off days in Philadelphia, Teatr-Pralnia with CCA Dakh stopped in Pittsburgh for a week long residency with Pittsburgh Cultural Trust.
• In addition to a workshop with high school and college students, the group performed on October 12th and 13th as part of the Pittsburgh International Festival of Firsts. 

Washington, DC - October 14-16

• Teatr-Pralnia with CCA Dakh landed in the Nation's capital with a welcome from the State Department, rehearsal time, and an interview with VOA Ukraine. You can read that interview here.
• The group performed at the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage on October 16th. You can watch the performance here. 

Portland, OR - October 17-27

• Crossing the country to the West Coast, Teatr-Pralnia with CCA Dakh made themselves at home in Portland for a 10-day residency hosted by Boom Arts.
• Their jam packed time included hosted lunches and dinners with Boom Arts, a reception at MarkovCo Gallery, a puppetry workshop with disabled adults, a Q&A at Multnomah Central Library, and class visits with Russian Language students and Advanced Acting students at Willamette University in Salem, OR.
• During their residency, the group performed four times at the Paris Theatre on October 19th, 20th, 26th, and 27th. 

Albuquerque, NM - October 28-November 4

• The last leg of Teatr-Pralnia with CCA Dakh's Center Stage tour was in Albuquerque. The group joined several classes at the University of New Mexico, including Performance & Activism and Devised Theater, Circus, & Physical Storytelling. 
• Co-hosted by Tricklock Performance Lab and AMP concerts, the group finished their Center Stage tour with two performances on November 2nd and 3rd, including post performance Q&As. 

program notes

TseSho?/What’s That?
a production of Teatr-Pralnia with CCA Dakh
(Kyiv, Ukraine)

U.S. Premiere

Performers

Igor Mytalnykov, drums
Kateryna Petrashova, saxophone, melodica
Nadiia Golubtsova, bass
Marusia Ionova, cello
Marichka Shtyrbulova, accordion

Director and Set Designer

Vlad Troitskyi
Kateryna Beslik, Costume Designer
Maksym Taran, Music Engineer
Natalka Perchyshena, Lighting Designer 
Olena Avramenko, VJ and Designer

“TseSho?/What’s That?” is a presentation of Center Stage, a public diplomacy initiative of the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, administered by the New England Foundation for the Arts in cooperation with the U.S. Regional Arts Organizations, with support from the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art, and the Trust for Mutual Understanding. General management is provided by Lisa Booth Management, Inc.

About TseSho?/What’s That?

TseSho?/What’s That? deploys a cabinet full of musical and theatrical material to spin its super-charged puppet cabaret. The actor-performers peer through the open and incisive lens of children to ask honest, urgent questions about a world they’re struggling to understand. Who are we in a world of buzzing (mis)information and deceptive surfaces? How do we figure our place in the world? TseSho?

TseSho-TseSho-TseSho-Tse-Sho… Director Vlad Troitskyi: “We like the sound, the rhythm of that phrase in Ukrainian. In our performance it’s a question designed to provoke. Who are we? Who are we in this world of fake news, when you get lost in the newsfeed, when you start to lose your own memories? When your heart is broken by the news of death and war and destruction, but you are far, far away?

“The questions we ask are challenging people in all sorts of countries, people everywhere. Children are free in many ways, and a free creature isn’t afraid to live honestly; to ask questions, to challenge. We want people to feel that, and see how it interacts with their own sense of self and identity. When the audience gets that, we’ll feel like we’ve done what we set out to do.” 

TseSho?/What’s That? premiered in May 2017 and has since been performed throughout Ukraine and in Europe.

About the Artists

Teatr-Pralnia (laundry theater) was founded in 2015 by five graduates from Kyiv Theatre University - Igor Mytalnykov, Nadia Golubtsova, Marichka Shtyrbulova, Marusia Ionova, and Kateryna Petrashova.  As students these five performers dreamed about creating a troupe which would combine puppetry, drama, and live music that would represent what their generation of Ukrainians were really talking (and worried) about.  

After graduation each started to learn different music instruments, to sing, and explore Ukrainian folklore; to create songs, to examine themselves, their peers, and their world. They staged provocative, visually stylized vignettes in the street, in clubs, and in living rooms. A half-year later they made their first formal performance with the director from Poland Marcin Brzozowski.

A year later Teatr-Pralnia met Vlad Troitskyi who invited Teatr-Pralnia to take up residence in his avant-garde Dakh Cultural Center and together they created TseSho?/what’s That?

About their name: “We join some opposite things, such as something important and something simple, specific and general, little and great, such as heart and mind, such as theater and laundry. We act and we are ourselves. We ask questions to wash souls, to clean hearts, to freshen minds.”

CCA Dakh Theater maker, director, and producer Vlad Troitskyi set up Center for Contemporary Arts Dakh Kyiv in 1994.  25 years later it is one of Europe’s most important and influential creative performance centers: a theater lab, an educational platform, a training center for the education of actor-performers, a platform for contemporary theater makers from abroad (Vasilyi Sigarev, Martin McDonagh, Mark Ravenhill), and one of the most important incubators of musical forms and theatrical trends from all over Europe. CCA Dakh is the home and launch pad for the ethno-chaos band DakhaBrakha and the freak-cabaret Dakh Daughters. In 2007 CCA Dakh launched Ukraine’s first multi-disciplinary festival of contemporary art-GOGOLFEST.

Vlad Troitskyi, Director

• founder and president of GOGOLFEST
• founder and artistic director of DAKH Centre of Contemporary Art
• director and producer of DakhaBrakha ethno-chaos band
• director and producer of Dakh Daughters freak cabaret
• director and ideologist of NOVA OPERA art movement
• founder of LCD movement (Laboratory of Contemporary Drama)
• author and director of many art projects in Ukraine and abroad

TseSho?What’s That, a project of Teatr-Pralnia with CCA Dakh makes its U.S debut tour October 2-November 3, 2018 as part of Center Stage. Stops include Gainesville FL, Bethlehem and Pittsburgh PA, Washington DC, Portland OR, and Albuquerque NM. For more information and the complete schedule, visit www.centerstageUS.org

background

Borderless Identity Bricolage: The Super-Charged Puppet Cabaret of Teatr-Pralnia Ask Big Questions in TseSho?/What’s That?

Kyiv’s Teatr-Pralnia (Laundry Theater) draws you into an apartment living room, settling you amid a couch, overstuffed  chairs, a bench, a wash tub, and scattered rugs; bric-a-brac on every surface and instruments in every nook. There, five kids in overalls shout, sing, recite, scramble, and play, sometimes with their counterparts -- five identically dressed doll-puppets. There’s passion and loopy drabness, curiosity and disassociation. Rhythms propel musical numbers that are funny and madcap and intense, connecting to passages from great Ukrainian poetic texts and disposable Facebook posts with folk song rhymes, and off-the-cuff vamps all rolled into a non-stop puppet cabaret.

You may ask “What’s That?” and that’s exactly what Pralnia wants. Guided by director Vlad Troitsky, the widely admired mastermind of GogolFest, and the Dakh Contemporary Arts Center (CCA Dakh), (home company of DakhaBrakha and Dakh Daughters), in TseSho?/What’s That? Pralnia deploys a cabinet full of musical and theatrical material. They peer through the innocent and incisive lens of children to ask honest, urgent questions about a world they’re struggling to understand. How do we form an identity in a world of buzzing (mis)information and deceptive surfaces? How do we come to terms with our place in the world and in history? TseSho?

Troitsky emphasizes the borderless importance of What’s That’s main idea. “The questions we’re asking are challenging people in all sorts of countries, people everywhere. Children are free in many ways, and a free creature isn’t afraid to live honestly. We want people to feel that, and see how it interacts with their own sense of self and identity. When the audience understands that, we’ll feel like we’ve done what we set out to do.”

U.S. Debut Tour in 2018

Teatr-Pralnia joins four other ensembles from Egypt and Ukraine that will make independent tours of the U.S. from July-December in 2018 as part of Center Stage, a cultural exchange program that invites performing artists from abroad to the United States to perform, meet, and share their experiences with communities around the country. Center Stage is a public diplomacy initiative of the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

Pralnia (“laundry”) was launched in June 2015, the day after the troupe’s five members graduated from the Puppetry Department at Kyiv’s National University of Theater, Cinema, and Television. “We had a vision of an ideal theater/laboratory. We understood that we wanted to work in a theater that didn’t exist, so we decided to make one ourselves,” says Pralnia’s Marusia Ionova. And about the name they chose: “We join some opposite things; something important and something simple, something specific and something general, little and great, heart and mind, theater and laundry. We act and we are ourselves,” explains Iovona. “We ask questions to wash souls, to clean hearts, to freshen minds.”

The troupe put on skits and shows --- in the streets, in found spaces, small theaters -- gathering followers like fearless pied pipers to their quirky performances that commanded attention with bold, folk-style voices, cagey lyrics, and compelling, poker-faced delivery. Troitsky loved the work -- “there’s a bit of troublemaking in what they do,” he says slyly -- and he invited them to create a piece together at Dakh, Ukraine’s influential performance incubator. They opted for what they dubbed a “puppet cabaret,” capturing the edgy intimacy of the club variety show while using blank-faced puppets to explore complex themes.

“We liked the sound, the rhythm of that phrase in Ukrainian: TseSho?” explains Troitsky. “In our performance it’s the question designed to provoke. Who are we? Who are we in this world of fake news, when you get lost in the newsfeed, when you start to lose your own memories? When your heart is broken by the news of death and war and destruction, but you are far, far away?”

The experience of putting together What’s That pushed Pralnia’s performers to blow open their performance skills. They decided the play demanded instrumental music. Each actor picked their own. “Before this play, we didn’t play instruments,” laughs Ionova. “We chose the instrument that appealed to us the most. Some of us played around on our own, and some took lessons.” Like much else about TseSho, the ensemble of double bass (Nadiia Golubstova), cello (Marusia Ionova), melodic (Kateryna Petrashova), accordion (Marichka Shtyrbulova), and a haphazard trap set (Igor Mytalnykov), supplemented with ocarinas, whistles, and boomwhackers, creates a freewheeling aural and visual cacophony that extends the work’s emotional range.

As a whole, the production is a loose assemblage of discrete but linked skits or numbers that change, and can be rearranged, theatrically knitted together. This improvisational approach, and an emphasis on expression that belies calculated technical skill, fits the bricolage of words and ideas and images on stage. “We choose lyrics by grabbing texts wherever we can, finding them in books, on Facebook, what we hear on the street today, or from different historical eras,” explains Ionova. “We have our own original lyrics, too. Sometimes we write something down as we’re on the way into the theater.”

The city on the way to the theater has ample food for thought to offer. Kyiv has been at the heart of Ukraine’s upheavals, mass protests, violence, and high hopes since the nation’s independence in 1991. Today, while virtual battles rage in online propaganda and trolling, and malware worms its way into vital computer systems, very real combat continues in eastern Ukraine and in the Crimea following Russia’s military annexation of Ukrainian territories in 2014. This land grab has precipitated a weakened political system, a divided populace, a refugee crisis, misinformation campaigns, and dissident crackdowns – some of the very issues now erupting around Western Europe and America.

TseSho?/What’sThat? approaches these developments from a perspective that foregrounds the ambivalent and multifaceted tensions we face between our inner and outer worlds. Like its children protagonists, Pralnia’s performers here project tensions, determinations, stresses, and feelings rather than events. It isn’t about politics; it’s about human experience.

Performed in a mix of Ukrainian, Russian and English, the show is constantly evolving, as new pieces and moments are incorporated. The group will weave in more and more English-language material, keeping their American audiences in mind. It’s an organic part of their process. “We’re always playing new music and texts, and so it’s impossible to say exactly what it will be,” says Ionova. “But the concept remains the same. The main idea doesn’t change.”

About Center Stage

Center Stage is a public diplomacy initiative of the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, administered by the New England Foundation for the Arts. From June-December 2018, Center Stage will tour five ensembles from Egypt and Ukraine in the U.S. These are Dina El Wedidi (Giza, Egypt), Kurbasy (Lviv, Ukraine), Mohamed Abozekry & Karkadé (Cairo, Egypt), Teatr-Pralnia with CCA Dakh (Kyiv, Ukraine), and Youssra El Hawary (Cairo, Egypt).

Now in its fourth season, by the end of 2018, 29 performing arts ensembles from nine nations -- Algeria, Egypt, Haiti, Indonesia, Morocco, Pakistan, Tanzania, Ukraine, and Vietnam -- will have toured from coast to coast, hosted by colleges and universities, festivals, music clubs, and cultural centers. Each tour includes residencies in large cities and small towns, and a range of activities from performances, workshops, and discussions, to artist-to-artist exchanges, masterclasses, and community gatherings. Center Stage artists engage with audiences onstage and online sharing their work with audiences in the U.S. and friends and fans at home to build mutual understanding through shared cultures and values.

Center Stage is made possible in cooperation with the U.S. Regional Arts Organizations, and with support from the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art, and the Trust for Mutual Understanding. General management is provided by Lisa Booth Management, Inc.

press

• Your Daily Picture: TseSho - What's That?
• VOA News: Український театральний проект ЦеШо підкорює Америку (English Translation)
• Oregon Arts Watch: Boom Arts: puppets from Kiev
• Alibi: What's That? It's international theater in the heart of ABQ
• Pittsburgh Tattler: “In the Tunnel” and “TseSho/ What’s That?” – Pittsburgh International Festival of Firsts
• Vehzna: «В нас є право бути дуже вільними»: ким є нові підопічні Влада Троїцького «ЦеШо»? (English Translation)
• The Guardian: 'Our performances are a mirror': making art out of Ukraine's pain
• UATV: No Ordinary Cabaret: Ukrainian Theatre Group Uses Improv to Tackle Social Issues
• Vogue Ukraine: "ЦеШо": все про новий театральний проект Влада Троїцького (TseSho: Everything you want to know about Vlad Troitsky’s New Theater Project) (English translation here)         
• The Village: Онуки Влада Троїцького (Troitsky's Grandchildren) (English translation here)
• Mind: Велике прання: чому варто подивитися нову постановку Влада Троїцького (English translation here)

downloadable photos, billing & crediting information

Credit Info

The following credit is required on the title page in all printed performance programs. We appreciate its use wherever else it's practical: brochures, posters, ensemble-only promotional materials, press releases, advertisements, etc:

The presentation of Teatr-Pralnia with CCA Dakh is part of Center Stage, a public diplomacy initiative of the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, administered by the New England Foundation for the Arts in cooperation with the U.S. Regional Arts Organizations, with support from the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art, and the Trust for Mutual Understanding. General management is provided by Lisa Booth Management, Inc.

Center Stage logo placement is greatly appreciated. On web-based materials, please link from the Center Stage logo or written name to www.centerstageUS.org.

Download a zipped folder with high resolution promotional photos and color and black and white versions of the Center Stage logo at the link below.

Teatr Pralnia with CCA Dakh Photos and Logos.zip