Highlights from the “Voices From Chornobyl” anniversary reading at the Deaf West Theatre in North Hollywood, April 26, 2009. Shot and edited by Lysandra Petersson. Featuring the talents of:
Vasily Shimansky..…..Bradford Beacom
Anna Sushko…….Enci
Grigory……..Aaron Lyons / Brian M. Cole
Sergei Gurin……..Shawn MacAulay / Tyrone Giordano*
A Solitary Human Voice………Kristin Mochnick / Catherine MacKinnon
Katya Shimansky……Kappa Victoria Wood / Evelina Gaina
Writer and Director: Cindy Marie Jenkins
Inspired by the book Voices From Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich
Published by Galina Dursthoff, Inc.
A fascinating conversation when Joanna O. who volunteered to translate the play into Polish, asked me about this line:
ANNA
The first fear came out of the blue, over water—
Joanna asked:
what blue? the mood? or literally? sometimes these lines come all of the sudden, out of context, that i feel slightly confused
and my answer:
sure, it can be confusing, they come out of context so that it feels like these different characters all experienced the confusion at the same time. sometimes they understand it, sometimes they don’t, but they are all feeling the same kind of limbo.
in the case of “blue” , however, it can translate to “out of nowhere” — out of the blue is an expression shortened from “out of the clear blue sky” meaning that it came suddenly. is there another expression in polish that has a stronger meaning than just came suddenly? it doesn’t have to translate literally in this case.
This interpretation came up with our Deaf West co-production, too, especially since ASL uses fewer words than we do and the repetition that I use as a device in the play doesn’t work the same way in ASL.
I remember that we had an entire conversation about a line that the Nurse says to a woman whose husband is about to die from acute radiation poisoning: “You are sitting next to a reactor.” To a hearing audience, that means (in the context of the play) ‘You might as well just sit next to the Chernobyl reactor as sit next to your husband; he is just as radioactive and contagious.”
For the ASL audience, our Voice said the line as is but Catherine, our deaf actress, signed “He is very contagious.”
That kept reminding me of a line I heard in Eastern Europe: “All wars are due to bad translation.”
That’s really what made me want to learn ASL. Once I mentioned that to my cast, half of them immediately signed up, along with Amy Hendrickson, the understudy, and two of our audience members! Caitie Hannon, my assistant director for the whole festival, hooked us up with Sonya Wilson, who is a fabulous instructor in ASL. We learn deaf culture as well as signing. It is more fun and eye-opening and TIRING than most things I have tried so far.
I also learned another valuable lesson: when collaborating so that your project can reach a deaf audience, add closed captioning into everything. It seems obvious, but it isn’t something we think about because WE don’t have to. By simply adding closed captioning, you can reach even more people, and hopefully earn their respect as well. Enci, who is heavily involved with Chornobyl but who also is filming a short film this summer (Rebel Without a Car Productions), has insisted on the closed captioning for not only her film, but also for the documentaries leading up to the filming.
Just fascinating new ways of looking at the world.
Here is a joint proposal between the VOICES team and the East Hollywood Neighborhood Council—looking for artists to participate! Email for more information:
PROPOSAL
for
VOICES FROM EAST HOLLYWOOD:
Autobiography of a Neighborhood
Dear Ms. Abeyta and Mr. Miller,
VOICES FROM EAST HOLLYWOOD will connect the neighborhood council with the people who live there, thus narrowing the focus of the neighborhood council by going to directly to the source. Now, some members feel they are imposing their vision onto this neighborhood instead of deriving their vision from voices within the neighborhood.
The East Hollywood Neighborhood Council has invited the creators of VOICES FROM CHORNOBYL to participate in a lengthy partnership that would regularly culminate in opening the council’s doors to a symposium with the people-and specifically children-who live there.
VOICES FROM CHORNOBYL is a play that has been running in various locations in Los Angeles since early 2006—the piece breathes life into real peoples’ stories in an accessible way to any audience. It creates a narrative out of transcripts of about fifty interviews and creates a cohesive story.
Why is it such a powerful experience? The key is that the play is taken from actual words from real people - derived from the experiences of witnesses to the event. We will use a similar process to creating VOICES FROM CHORNOBYL in East Hollywood and share our work and transcripts with the Easy Hollywood Neighborhood Council.
The Fluxus show at Barnsdall would jumpstart this long term project that shows how art can change your part of the world, your neighborhood. Part of the reason that art is dying in low to middle income neighborhoods is because it loses relevance. Using art as an agent of change will not only fling open many doors to the community’s governing bodies, but also bring the neighborhood to the exhibit and in many cases serve as a resident’s first introduction to live art. We believe this first experience will stick because instead of art reflecting life, it is art integrated with life.
How will this all happen?
We will put out all the web media and let people take it in any direction they want. We will present a series of questions and various methods of submitting your answers—school essay and art contests, teaming up with local filmmakers to do “Man on the street” interviews, facebook posts/pictures/videos. Residents can submit a song, a poem, a picture, essay, blogging—we will partner with local businesses for open mic nights and schoolteachers to be sure the students are represented. The only restriction is that you must be currently living in East Hollywood.
An idea of the questions to springboard submissions would be:
~What do you see when you look outside your windows?
~If you could have anything in the world, what would you want in your neighborhood?
~How would you like your neighborhood to change?
This will give the East Hollywood Neighborhood Council a beginning database for focusing our neighborhood’s vision.
There are opportunities for either a rotating or permanent exhibit of our submissions that could change weekly, depending on space.
By intersecting VOICES FROM CHORNOBYL and VOICES FROM EAST HOLLYWOOD, we will hand the story-the plot of the neighborhood’s improvements-to the people living in the settings. Starting a political dialogue has been difficult in East Hollywood; a major challenge to the neighborhood council is bridging the gap between residents and their government, where they can have a voice. A major challenge to live art is relevance–creating an environment in which anyone can participate and understand the different avenues through which they can channel their voice. We feel it is an ideal match.
From the UMass Amherst Spring 2008 Magazine for Alumni & Friends
“I’ve played an 80-year-old, the romantic lead, the best friend, the good guy, the villain . . . I can do all that, but in film it’s about looks first, then acting.”
Aaron Lyons ’99 Actor Aaron Lyons has been an office temp, a landscaper, and a cook; he has worked as a massage therapist, cared for children, and tended elephants. Elephants? “I was raised in the circus,” he admits. “Ringling Brothers. Both my parents worked there.”
Lyons has also directed plays and led acting workshops. His record as a working actor is impressive—parts in some 76 plays since 1989—but he estimates, “Sixty percent of the work I do is to make ends meet, mostly backstage gigs.”
There’s a bright side to that work, aside from the paychecks. “If a character works at a coffee shop or on a horse ranch, I can say, ‘Okay, I’ve done that, I know how that works.’ It’s one less thing I need to research,” says Lyons. “The foundation of any character I portray, though, comes from my need to know why people do what they do. Exploring the reasons is what I love most.”
For Lyons, an acting career was never a question. “It was the first thing I did that didn’t bore me. It’s something that you can constantly be improving on. When I worked in an office?”—his voice and an eyebrow go up—“there was one way to do things. But acting … there are hundreds of ways.”
Last fall, in the theater piece Voices from Chornobyl, Lyons played Arkady Fillin, a survivor of the nuclear plant explosion and meltdown in the Ukraine 21 years ago. As Fillin, Lyons described the aftermath: “We were handed shovels. We buried houses, wells, trees. We buried earth. We buried the forest.”
“The stakes were immediately high,” Lyons says of the part, “partly because of the subject matter, but also because it’s a biographical role. And there’s the question of how to respect the seriousness but also the storytelling aspect of the piece.”
But before you can play the part, you have to get the part. Lyons knows the drill. “You have to be businesslike about it, go to auditions all the time. And you can’t let rejection get to you.”
For the past year and a half, he’s been going after film work in Los Angeles, where he lives. Moving from the stage to the screen requires an agent, a manager, and a different mindset.
“Onstage I’ve played an 80-year-old, the romantic lead, the best friend, the good guy, the villain… I can do all that, but in film it’s about looks first, then acting,” Lyons explains. “If they want someone who’s a foot taller and has blue eyes, I won’t get the part, no matter what my experience is.”
The hazel-eyed actor figures his best shot at film or TV work is bad-guy roles. “If I relax my face,” he says, letting his mouth sag and pulling his eyebrows down, “I look angry.” (He does.) “When I do that, people look at me and say, ‘Aaron’s pissed,’ even if I’m not; I’m just thinking.”
To help his chances, Lyons is doing his homework, talking to directors and going on sets. One example: “I had a bit part in West Wing. After I was done, I asked if I could hang around and watch.”
Says Lyons, “Film is an intimate medium. You’re much more exposed. With theater you’re more aware of your surroundings, your shoelace being untied, the lighting, can you be heard? If you screw up onstage, you have to fix it right there. In film, it’s a lot about you and your scene partner. When you’re making a film, they tell you, ‘Don’t be so big.’ It’s more focused work.”
Last fall, a friend’s wedding brought him back to the East Coast, and he came to campus to talk to theater students. Before the workshop he was asked, What will you say to these aspiring actors?
“You’re screwed!” he said with a big laugh. “Get out now! Learn computers; we’re all going to be replaced by cartoons!” When the time came, though, he showed how much he believes in his vocation, staying an extra hour or so to answer questions. Even if acting doesn’t always put food on the table, he says, “No other job can feed me like acting does.”
By Eoin English
THOUSANDS of firefighters who lost their lives in the Chernobyl nuclear disaster were remembered at ceremonies in Cork and Dublin yesterday to mark the 19th anniversary of the accident. They gave their lives to prevent an atomic explosion at the plant which would have made Europe uninhabitable, the Chernobyl Children’s Project said.
Director Adi Roche said fires at the plant could have triggered a nuclear explosion 50 to 80 times the force of Hiroshima.
She paid tribute to the 25,000 “liquidators” who died and the 70,000 who are permanently disabled as a result of making the reactor safe.
While people had a “searing image” of the firefighters in 9/11, nobody had a similar understanding of the heroism of the “liquidators”, she said. She was speaking in Dublin where 19 children, each with a candle and a photograph of a worker, commemorated the men who died.
The Belarussian Ambassador to Britain, Dr Alyaksei Mazhukhou, said 1.5 million people, including 420,000 children, were still living in affected areas.
“Chernobyl remains a great burden for our people and our economy,” he said.
However, the future of recuperation visits to Ireland of children from the affected region remains uncertain.
In Cork, two white doves were released from City Hall during an ecumenical service attended by lord mayor Sean Martin and Ukrainian Ambassador Yevhen Perelygin.
The Greater Chernobyl Cause also announced it is sending an aid convoy to the Ukraine tomorrow. Included is an ultrasound machine that can detect early cancer in patients.
Meanwhile, Ms Roche warned that the consequences of the disaster would not be fully felt for another five decades.
Congenital birth defects have increased by 250% since the disaster, while one-in-four children in Belarus will develop thyroid abnormalities including cancer, she said. Environmentalist Duncan Stewart said the cement sarcophagus that covers the damaged reactor and which contains 97% of the plant’s lethal material is in need of repair, at a cost of €758 million. The Children’s Project called for the international community to help make the reactor safe and rebuild lives.
You probably went looking all over the site for Part 1. It’s not on this blog. It’s on the Women In Theatre blog.
It is quite funny to read about all the things “Enci” when I google my name. But the most interesting thing was this:
European Nuclear Cities Initiative
(ENCI)
Preamble
A key-element in the military nuclear complex of the former Soviet Union has been the creation of 10 cities, closed to the external world, fully dedicated to the various stages of the building of nuclear weapons. These nuclear cities, with an aggregated population of over 700,000 people, still host a body of scientists and technicians of high skill and professionality. As a consequence of the process of downsizing that necessarily involves (and will involve) the Russian nuclear cities, many of these scientists and technicians need to find job-alternatives. Otherwise they may, in the long run, constitute a serious source of proliferation concern. Many initiatives have been taken to address the problems discussed so far. Unfortunately, it is unrealistic to expect that these problems will take care of themselves after a while. Letting time go by, is not a solution. The task of addressing the problems pertaining to the complex of the former Soviet Union, will demand international cooperation for many years to come and at a level that should be much higher than the present one.
Up to now we have seen a constructive cooperation between many countries of the industrialized world and the countries of the former Soviet Union, as in the ISTC and in the TACIS, and specifically we have seen the whole array of US-Russian cooperation initiatives, projects and agreements (Cooperative Threat Reductions, Material Protection and Accounting Program, Nuclear Cities Initiative, lab to lab cooperation, Purchase of Fissile material, etc.).
The task of securing a smooth economic transition and of reducing the proliferation risks of the Russian nuclear cities is of paramount importance and demands prompt attention and, probably, a better effort than the present one. The specific problem of nuclear cities and their economic conversion has been addressed, up to now, in the framework of US-Russian cooperation, by the “Nuclear Cities Initiative (NCI)”.
This can be an area in which European countries could contribute and do more for the nuclear problems of the former Soviet Union and, simultaneously, do more for international security.
Draft Project
The idea here is to promote a “European Nuclear Cities Initiative (ENCI)” project that could complement the US-Russian NCI.
The ENCI could consist of a general framework for European-Russian cooperation initiatives to be carried on at various levels, e.g. Government to Government, Agency to Agency, Lab to Lab, Region to Region, without ruling out a possible direct cooperation between Russia and the European Union.
Coordination with the US-NCI should be obviously guaranteed. The ENCI should aim at fostering non-proliferation, environmental clean-up and economic conversion. The primary reference of ENCI should be the scientists and technicians of the nuclear cities. The proposal of an ENCI is perfectly consistent with the “Common Strategy of the European Union on Russia” adopted in Cologne, Germany, last 4 June 1999.
The cooperation between European Government and Institutions, on one side, and Russian Government and Institutions and the Nuclear Cities could be focused on topics like:
Advanced energy technologies and energy efficiency
Monitoring of environmental pollution and environmental clean up
Controlling radioactive waste
Fostering commercial enterprises in those scientific-technological fields that are familiar to the scientists of the nuclear cities
Creation of analytic and modelling computing centres in the cities
The nuclear cities that could be involved in the ENCI program could be, at least at the beginning, Snezhinsk (Chelyabinsk-70) and Sarov (Arzamas-16).
Forum
Under the auspices and with the support of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs the Landau Network-Centro Volta (an Italian NGO that, among other goals, promotes cooperation with scientists of the former Soviet Union) - gathering the indications coming from a preliminary meeting on ENCI at the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Rome among Russian, American and Italian experts - will organize, with the scientific/technological collaboration of ENEA, an international Forum in Rome, at the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ structure Istituto Diplomatico “Mario Toscano” (Villa Madama), on December 13-14, 1999. The Forum will be aimed at defining and promoting the ENCI program. A preliminary draft agenda includes the following arguments: creation of energy efficiency centres and development “in loco” of advanced energy technologies and demonstration facilities; creation of analytic and modelling computing centres; development of environmental activities (including monitoring and mathematical modelling); analysis of financing mechanisms to involve international investments, to favour technological transfer and to start commercialization activities; analysis of the necessary items for the preparation of a joint statement on EU-Russian cooperation to implement the ENCI and discussions of times, modalities and financing procedures to start and develop the ENCI project from the year 2000.
We expect that the Forum will be attended by scientists and staff from the Russian nuclear cities, representatives of Russian Minatom, of the Russian American Nuclear Cities Initiative, experts and officials of the US and of the EU countries, representatives from enterprises associations. The Forum will be informal in the sense that participants will speak on their personal capacities and that participation will not imply any endorsement from the Institution or the Organization to which the participants belong.
The spirit of the Forum is to provide a scheme of action in the frame of ENCI, which should help the International Community in making a leap forward towards addressing the difficult problems of the Russian nuclear legacy.
How appropriate to be involved in the production of Voices From Chornobyl
Filed under: People, History — Cindy Marie Jenkins @ 8:17 pm
Chernobyl voices: Lena and Anya Kostuchenko
Lena Kostuchenko, 39, and her daughter Anya, 19 Chernobyl zone evacuees in Kiev
I was five months’ pregnant when the accident occurred. My husband and I were spending the weekend at my mother’s house in Kopachi (a village just south of the power station). We woke up on Saturday morning and decided to go to Chernihiv, the nearest big town, to buy maternity clothes.At the bus stop we saw lots of fire engines and troop carriers on the main road. We waited and waited, but no bus came. Eventually a policeman told us there would be no buses, because there had been an accident.There had been small accidents before, so we did not worry. We worked in the garden all day.
In 2004, Anya caught meningitis and was in a coma for three days
On the Sunday I had to go to work in Pripyat. Again there were no buses, so we set off on foot. But I began to feel very ill, before I had got half way. My husband helped me home, then walked to Pripyat alone.
When he got back, he said the town had been evacuated. By then I had got out of bed and wandered outside. Another policeman finally told me the truth - he said there was high radiation and pregnant women should get out at all costs. At that time I did not know what radiation was.
Abortions
Police were blocking the main road, but we drove to Ivankiv via back roads. Two days later I ended up in hospital. Doctors threw away my clothes, and “decontaminated” me with a cold shower.
There were lots of other pregnant women there. The doctors said all would have abortions, or induced births. They did some of the abortions quickly, then changed their mind and said we would all give birth, after all.
We went to Chop (on the Hungarian border) then to Mykolayiv (near the Black Sea). In each new town, I had to throw away the clothes I had bought in the last one. They must have been contaminated by my own radioactive body.
I gave birth to Anya two months early. She was big - 2.5kg (5.5lbs) and 49cm tall - but her nails had not formed and she was a yellowish colour, so she was put in an incubator. I was not allowed to see her for eight days.
Blood disease
Later, when we moved to Kiev, specialists hospitalised her on sight. Her haemoglobin count was about a quarter or a third of the normal level. At that time you could not say it was because of Chernobyl - it could be anything except Chernobyl. Much later a haematology professor told me I had been very unlucky: I was in the wrong place at the wrong time of my pregnancy.
Anya is like a house plant. She has a very rare blood disease and almost no immunity. In 2004 she caught meningitis and was in a coma for three days. A doctor told me it was all over, but she pulled through.
In the 1990s a law was passed, which promised benefits to Chernobyl invalids, but it said nothing about child invalids. Together with some other parents I formed an organisation, Flowers in the Wormwood, which successfully lobbied for the law to be changed.
There is a tendency now to play down the problem of Chernobyl, and, if possible, to forget it. Once the 20th anniversary has passed, I think the state will begin to withdraw support.
I did some search on MySpace. I typed in the search “Chornobyl” and a bunch of stuff came up. A lot of people write about the incident and I also found some people who are personally affected by it.
One couple for example adopted two children from Chornobyl. Find out for yourself by going to MySpace.
In 2004, Anya caught meningitis and was in a coma for three days 