History
The Antonin Artaud Fellowship was established in 2022 to support Ukrainian artists who continued their creative work in Ukraine despite the full-scale Russian invasion.
We wanted to see more Ukrainian works resonate both with local and international audiences and establish a lasting presence on the international scene. We recognized the importance and urgency of artistic exploration and experimentation, despite all the limitations caused by the war.
The fellowship was founded by the proto produkciia agency and the contemporary opera laboratory Opera aperta. It is named after Antonin Artaud, a French writer, playwright, theater reformer, actor, poet, and essayist.
The choice of name was preceded by a long journey: constant discussions about theater and its current state, the Ukrainian translation of the book “The Theater and Its Double,” for which we are grateful to the Zhupansky Publishing House and the French Institute in Ukraine. We were inspired by the question of searching for a new theatrical language, which Artaud also wrote about. That’s why we don’t focus on specific genres but support exploration and experimentation.
Chronology of the Antonin Artaud Fellowship
2022
- June: Start of work and development of the Fellowship concept.
- September – December: First round of the Fellowship, during which the presentation of 4 works in progress was supported in Kyiv.
2023
- March-April: Educational program “Defamiliarization of the Thing. An Attempt to Read ‘The Philosophy of Theater’ and Practice the Ideas of Les Kurbas” by Larysa Venediktova. Location: Kyiv.
- April: Educational program “Three Performative Sessions” by Yaroslav Futymsky. Location: Kyiv.
- May: Fellows attend performances at the Wiener Festwochen festival in Vienna.
- June: Larysa Venediktova’s workshop “How to Recover from Dramatic Vertigo?”. City: Ivano-Frankivsk.
- October – December: Southern edition of the Antonin Artaud Fellowship for artists from Zaporizhzhia, Odesa, Mykolaiv, and Kherson regions. Supported the creation and presentation of 6 works.
- November: Week-long Fellowship workshop in Odesa.
- November – December: Educational program in Kyiv for those who applied for the Fellowship.
2024
- February: Presentation of Nana Biakova’s work “Lost Movement” in Berlin at Kafe Kyiv.
- February – March: New round of the fellowship, 10 works in progress created and presented in Kyiv.
- April: Residency in Bucharest for Nana Biakova and Evgeniya Melkonyan. Presentation of “Lost Movement” in Bucharest.
- May – August: New round of the fellowship, 3 works in progress created and presented in Kyiv.
- September: Presentation of Anna Shevchenko’s performance in Berlin and Evgeniya Melkonyan’s performance in Vienna.