Like any country struggling with its colonial past, Ukraine and its theatre have gone through a difficult and arduous process of decolonisation from Russian and Soviet imperialism. This has manifested itself in many ways, from raising the cultural status of the Ukrainian national language to an artistic reckoning with the Soviet past in order to deal with historical and contemporary traumas such as Holomodor (the Stalinist famine in Ukraine in the 1930s), the Chernobyl disaster and the ongoing war. However, the decolonisation of Ukrainian culture, including theatre, can also be seen more narrowly in terms of the process of women’s emancipation in culture. Indeed, the Ukrainian theatre and dramaturgy of the last decade, whose creators are women, is the most radical response to the challenges of the inherited Soviet, patriarchal and colonial past.

The theatre and dramaturgy of artists such as Natalia Vorozhbyt, Oksana Dmitriieva, Natalka Blok, Olena Apchel, Roza Sarkisian and many others, critically work through the myth of victimhood that is strongly present in Ukrainian national culture (Ukraine has often been depicted in iconography as a raped or crucified woman, ). Moreover, it proposes ‘guerrilla’ tactics of resistance against more powerful subjects as a way of defence against rape culture (the male, Russian subject), and skilfully forms alliances with other precarious groups, such as the Ukrainian and European LGBTQ+ communities and Polish women fighting for reproductive rights, in order to build intersectional support.  Thus, in my lecture I will try to present the main challenges of decolonisation in Ukrainian culture and discuss the most representative examples of feminist theatrical practices aimed at building one’s own subjectivity. The lecture makes reference to Ewa Bal and Kasia Lech’s book entitled ‘Feminist Imagining in Polish and Ukrainian Theatres’ (to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2025), and will be illustrated with numerous extracts from Ukrainian theatre performances with English translations.   

Ewa Bal is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Polish Language and Culture for Foreigners at Jagiellonian University Faculty of Polish, Head of the Research Center of Local Cultures. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the European Association of Theatre and Performance (EASTAP) and International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR). Her current scientific interests include methodologies of performance and indigenous studies, as well as de/post colonial strategies of theatre and performance in the Central-Eastern Europe. She published articles on issues of cultural mobility, nationalisms, emancipatory strategies of linguistic and ethnic minorities in Ukraine, Poland, Italy and Spain. She has co-edited, a co-authored several monographs and together with Yana Partola she is running the research project ‘Theatre as a Laboratory of Polish -Ukrainian Encounters. Perspectives of Com-passionate Thinking’ financed by Polish National Center of Science’.