Mission of the International Voices Project:
The International Voices Project (IVP) champions the work of global playwrights by creating opportunities to experience new and contemporary international plays on Chicago stages. IVP debuts voices from the world’s stages through commissions, translations, and production. We collaborate with consulates, cultural partners, and universities throughout the Chicagoland area and partner with national and international theatres to promote global playwrights in their USA premieres.
Playwright
Natalka Vorozhbyt is a Ukrainian playwright and director, a leader in the resurgence of Ukrainian national drama in the 21st century. Her first major play, Galka Motalko, had success shortly after she graduated from Moscow’s Gorky Literature Institute in 2000. The Grain Store, a historical work about the Holodomor, the state-induced famine in Ukraine in the 1930s, was produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in London in 2009. Vorozhbyt took part in the Euromaidan protests in Kyiv in 2013/14, and the theme of the ensuing war with Russia has colored her work ever since. In 2015 she was a co-founder, with Georg Genoux, of the Theater of Displaced People which offered an opportunity for refugees from the Donbas region to tell their stories in a formal, theatrical context. She wrote the screenplay for Cyborgs, a 2017 film about the bloody defense of an airport in Donetsk against Russian separatists. Bad Roads (2017) was staged at the Royal Court Theater in London, and, since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, has been one of the most-produced Ukrainian plays internationally. As a film directed by the author, Bad Roads was Ukraine’s official Oscar selection in 2022. Green Channels was written near the end of 2023, and has already been produced in Kyiv at the Theater of Playwrights, and several venues in Europe. Although she wrote in Russian early in her career, Vorozhbyt now writes in Ukrainian. She is presently a writer-in-residence at Oxford University.
Director
Nicole Garneau is an interdisciplinary performing artist. Her book Performing Revolutionary: Art, Action, Activism was published in print in Spring 2018 by Intellect. In 2022, she narrated and released the audiobook version. Originally from Chicago, she now lives in Rockcastle County, Kentucky, where she teaches, makes theater, facilitates meetings, and throws parties. She is a member of Alternate ROOTS and an Appalachian Teaching Artist Fellow. She is a Master Trainer with TimeSlips Creative Storytelling, and was forever changed by her experience manifesting wildly creative projects in rural Kentucky nursing homes in 2018-2019. Her work has been supported by the Illinois Arts Council, Alternate ROOTS, Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the Live Art Development Agency of the UK. She maintains an active practice as a performing artist, most recently performing in the national tour of Ezell: Ballad of a Land Man, Faultline Ensemble’s This Place is a Message, Double Edge Theater’s The Hidden Territories of the Bacchae, Higher Ground in Harlan’s Angels Unaware, and her own new performance work called Prophet. She is currently producing the 2nd Annual Rebellious Performance Retreat. Nicolegarneau.com
International Voices Project in collaboration with Trap Door Theatre Presents:
Green Corridors
Written by Natalya Vorozhbyt
Translated by John Freedman & Natalia Bratus
Directed by Nicole Garneau
Monday, November 11th, 2024
When: 6pm – 9pm
Admission: Free
Where: Instituto Cervantes Chicago:
What: Staged reading followed by a talk back and complimentary reception.
Translators
John Freedman is an American writer and translator who, after working 30 years in Russia, now resides in Greece. He was the theater critic of The Moscow Times from 1992 to 2015. His play Dancing, Not Dead (2011) was winner of the Internationalists Global Play Contest (2011); his short play Five Funny Tales from the Heart of Buenos Aires (2013) has been performed in New York City, Chattanooga, and Edinburgh. He has translated over 160 dramatic texts, of which productions have been mounted in five continents. He is the author or compiler of numerous books, including Silence’s Roar: The Life and Drama of Nikolai Erdman (1992), and Provoking Theater: Kama Ginkas Directs (2003). He edited the anthology A Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War: 20 Short Works by Ukrainian Playwrights (Laertes Press), named one of the 50 best books published in 2023 by The Telegraph. He was Russian Director of The New Russian Drama: Translation/Production/Conference (2007-2010) conducted by Towson University and the Center for International Theatre Development (CITD); and Director of New American Plays for Russia (2010-2015), a CITD project bringing cutting edge American drama to Russia with the support of the U.S. embassy in Moscow under the auspices of the Bilateral Presidential Commission. He is the curator of two Worldwide Play Readings projects: Insulted. Belarus (2020 to present) and Worldwide Ukrainian Play Readings (2022 to present).
Natalia Bratus graduated in 1982 with a degree in metallurgical engineering in her hometown of Dnepropetrovsk (now Dnipro), Ukraine, the Soviet Union. She worked as a defectoscopist engineer for 10 years before becoming a private entrepreneur after Ukraine declared independence. She escaped the war in Ukraine with her daughter, grandson, and two family pets in March 2022, and immediately began working with John Freedman on translations of Ukrainian dramatic texts. Together they have produced 45 translations in two years.