Ten days without war

The forum finished with the performance Dreams of an Abandoned Road, staged by the director and leader of the GogolFest Vlad Troitsky with the help of ethno-chaos band DakhaBrakha and VJs Tenpoint. The music, the video projection, and elements of staging in the industrial interior of a concrete plant produced quite a worthy show.

However, the most remarkable music event of the recent days was the Theater of Trauma and Comedy, a joint concert of two by far the most original Kyiv bands, Hamerman znyshchuie virusy (Hammerman Kills Viruses) and Dakh Daughters. This is what the organizers wrote about this event, “After several psychotherapeutic sessions of hypnosis and rebirthing, Vova and Albert took the most terrible children’s memories from the dirty linen of their subconscious. Vodka, sex, and jogging were unable to help the musicians of HZV to forget about what they experienced, and to reconcile with the terrible knowledge about themselves, Vova and Albert decided to share it with the environment. So, you are welcome to the psychotherapeutic play Theater of Trauma and Comedy with the participation of Dakh Daughters and other musicians to make sure that not only haloperidol and talks on the couch are helpful in fighting children’s traumas.”

Hamerman znyshchuie virusy was founded in 1996 in Sumy. Now it is made up by two musicians from the original lineup, Volodymyr Pakholiuk (vocal, texts) and Albert (Oleh) Tsukrenko (vocal, music). From time to time they are joined by Serhii Trushel (guitar). They are laureates of the festival Chervona Ruta’97 and the winners of the competition “Pearls of Season-2000” in the category “dance music.” The band was a headliner of music festivals Reivakh (Ternopil, Yevpatoria) and Nashatyr (Dnipropetrovsk).

In a sense, Pakholiuk and Tsukrenko are creating something similar to Dakh Daughters’ work: this is neither rock, nor disco (although the energy is overwhelming and the audience dances violently); this is modern-style cabaret. The texts are full of apt black humor, mockery at the rules of moral majority, intellectualism mixed with obscene words, role of meticulous and clever harlequins, powerful music performance, and sufficient choreographic preparation are the qualities which bring Hamerman closer to an older tradition of anarchic obscene genre, like cabaret, rather than to more direct punk-rock hooliganism. This is the reason why the union with different, by similarly joyful, inclined to theatrality Dakh Daughter caused simply an explosive effect: there is no doubt that Theater of Trauma and Comedy can be called the best show of the festival and one of the best ones in this season in Kyiv.

On the whole, this year’s GogolFest broadened its scale and at the same time became more social. Compared with the previous years, the number of cafes in the open air, as well as souvenir, ecological, and other kinds of shops, increased. There was more music, more pictures on the walls, a fair of auteur clothes and accessories: art and trade intertwined here without contradiction.

At the GogolFest not only you could entertain yourself while spending the whole day with your family, but also learn something new or make something with your own hands, wander from one shop to another, one concert to another, one lecture to another, one studio to another; get dressed, teach your children something or entertain them: there were several grounds for children; listen to a reading of a play, watch a film or a play, learn to dance or idle in a hammock. The choice fitted everyone’s taste.

Owing to this in the half-abandoned industrial area an autonomous territory of not simply freedom, but constant creative movement emerged for 10 days, where everyone could feel himself an artist.

Hopefully, present-day problems won’t be an obstacle to holding GogolFest on a no less worthy level next year.