Workshops and public lectures will take place in Lviv (July 11–12), Odesa (August 15–16), and Zaporizhzhia (September 13–14). Thanks to cooperation with the Lithuanian Culture Institute and the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Ukraine, as well as partnerships with the independent Lyutyi Theatre (Odesa) and the theatre platform “Actor’s House” (Zaporizhzhia), the program’s mentors and lecturers will include artists from Lithuania, the Netherlands, and Ukraine.
Focusing on the theme “theatre between us,” we will explore how performative arts create spaces for dialogue between different experiences and identities, becoming tools for understanding the “other” and for mutual support. We will reflect on and practically explore how we can perform stories from our cities, bodies, regions, and wartime experiences — in the face of ongoing war and global transformations that carry the potential to shape the future or, at the very least, the memory/stories about us.
Program curator — Liuba Ilnytska.
LVIV PROGRAM
- July 11, 11:00–17:00 (break 14:00–15:00) – Workshop by Oksana Cherkashyna “Metal Fatigue”
- July 11, 19:00–20:30 – Public lecture by Yannick Nooman “Collective Creation and Contemporary Contexts”
- July 12, 11:00–17:00 (break 14:00–15:00) – Workshop by Yannick Nooman “Collective Working & Contemporary Forms”
Location: Lviv, Jam Factory Art Center, Auditorium Hall, 124 Bohdana Khmelnytskoho St
DETAILS
Participation in the workshops is free with prior registration. Entry to the lecture is open to all.
Workshop application deadline: July 4 (until 6pm). Responses will be sent by July 7.
Due to limited capacity, participants will be selected based on submitted applications. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis, so registration may close before the official deadline. Organizers reserve the right not to explain the reasons for declining applications.
Workshop: “Metal Fatigue” by Oksana Cherkashyna
Date: July 11, 11:00–17:00 (break from 14:00–15:00)
For: Actors and acting students
Cost: Free with registration. Limited spots; selection based on applications.
Workshop Description by Oksana Cherkashyna:
“Actors are emotional engines of the market. But acting drains you—not just emotionally or physically, but existentially. In aviation, ‘metal fatigue’ describes how a plane crashes not because of engine failure, but because the metal can’t withstand air pressure.
Philosopher Bojana Kunst argues that in today’s art system, artists are valued through the exploitation of their lives, expressions, and experiments with subjectivity. In my experience, what art and capitalism most have in common is their dangerous, seductive closeness to fully appropriating the artist’s life.
I invite actors and students who have felt this kind of exhaustion—or those beginning their careers who want to chart a path that won’t erase their identity—to join this practical session.
What alternative strategies for existing in today’s art system can we build? Has the democratization of acting and the post-dramatic emphasis on presence truly liberated actors, or has it become a formal cliché? What could shake a system that thrives on brutal competition, unpaid labor, and speculation on the value—or pointlessness—of artists’ lives?
How do artistic communities form through vulnerability and sharing? Should we retrain for more practical and ‘useful’ jobs during wartime? Is it still worth acting today? How do we keep from collapsing under the weight of our own ‘metal fatigue’?”
About workshop mentor
Oksana Cherkashyna is a Ukrainian stage and film actress, Honored Artist of Ukraine, and winner of the Golden Dzyga national film award. In over a decade, she has played about 60 lead roles.
She began her career in 2010 at the Shevchenko Theater in Kharkiv after graduating from the Kotlyarevsky National University. She has worked with theaters in Ukraine and Poland and created independent educational, theatrical, and community-driven projects.
Since 2020, she has won Poland’s top theater awards, including Best Actress at Krakow’s Divine Comedy Festival and the Grand Acting Prize of the National Contemporary Art Competition. She was also listed among the “50 Most Courageous Women in Poland” by Wysokie Obcasy, alongside Agnieszka Holland and Olga Tokarczuk.
Oksana prioritizes political art to provoke critical thinking, social change, and societal emancipation. Her work is a personal responsibility and ethical challenge. In 2023, she left the theater.
Public Lecture “Collective Creation and Contemporary Contexts” by Yannick Noomen
Date: July 11, 19:00–20:30
Language: English with Ukrainian translation
The lecture is free and open to all upon registration.
Lecture Description
In this keynote lecture, Yannick Noomen (actor, theater maker, and co-director of Nineties), offers an intimate insight into the journey of a collective that emerged from the urge to tell stories resonating with their own generation. Tracing the evolution of Nineties, Yannick reflects on how context shapes audience, how collaboration expands language, and how site-specificity became a method for making meaning.
From the early days of experimenting in unconventional spaces to the development of more radical and hybrid forms, the lecture explores Nineties’ collective approach to making; one that is fluid, interdisciplinary, and grounded in the spirit of multi facetted ambiguous world. Through examples of past work and reflections on process, Yannick invites the audience into a creative practice that blurs genres, reimagines authorship, and insists on staying in dialogue with all the different worlds outside the theater walls.
Practical Workshop: “Collective Working & Contemporary Forms” by Yannick Noomen
Date: July 12, 19:00–20:30
For: practitioners of performing arts with different experiences – directors, interdisciplinary artists, actors, performers, playwrights.
Cost: Free with registration. Limited spots; selection based on applications.
Workshop Description:
This workshop offers a hands-on dive into the collective working methods of Nineties Productions. Following a short introduction to the company’s site-specific, interdisciplinary, and generation-driven approach, participants will engage in a collaborative creation process.
Through theme extraction, mapping, and rapid prototyping, small groups develop short performance experiments using any kind of format, from interactive installations to social media-based theater or even just good old plain performance. The focus lies on collective authorship, experimentation, and exploring new ways of storytelling. The session ends with informal sharings and feedback aimed at pushing each concept further.
About speaker and workshop mentor
Yannick Noomen is a Dutch actor and theater maker who moves through performance, music, visual arts, technology, and philosophy as if they were different dialects of the same language. As co-director of Nineties Productions, a collective based in Amsterdam, he creates theatrical worlds that are both piercing and playful, resonating with the dissonance of our present moment.
In a world without a single truth or a universal point of view, Yannick embraces complexity. His work doesn’t aim to resolve it, but to inhabit it, embracing ambiguity as a space of possibility. His work often emerges from unconventional collaborations, where disciplines, perspectives and genres collide. He is drawn to stories that stretch the limits of form, that blur the boundaries between the human and the artificial, the poetic and the political.
What ties his work together is a deep curiosity for how we can contextualize, deconstruct and challenge our present worldviews. Whether on stage, in a digital realm, or somewhere in between, Yannick’s artistic voice is rooted in collectivity, contradiction, and a desire to shift the lens through which we see the world. He has performed and created work across Europe, the United States, and Asia, always seeking new contexts to reimagine what it means to be human – or something close to it – on stage.
The theatre education program “the black box” is supported by the European Union under the House of Europe programme.