the turquoise ether magazine’s mission is to publish independent critical reviews of promising artists from over The Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)

Turquoise #12 — Victoria Kostyukevich (Russia)

Victoria Kostyukevich is a bright playwright of modern Russia, a person who knows how to respond to the very pain of life and clothe her experience in high-precision artistic texts.

Victoria looks at Russia as if a little from the outside, living on its very outskirts, much closer to Japan than to Moscow — in Vladivostok. And yet this otherworldly gives her an amazing clarity and purity of view of the world, of Russia, of its past and present. The study of herself and her region turns into a study of the soul and experience of a contemporary in her plays. And this study, just like the object of this study, is painful, but healing.

Her plays “Russian Lalabai”, “Country of Vasyas” and other demonstrate a surprisingly lively, exciting, undifferentiated stream of consciousness and sensations, depicting the identity of a modern Russian (non-capital) person. This identity is built traumatically, but filled with lyricism. Poetry is born from everyday life, from lovingly or negatively comprehended facts of near reality.

In addition, Victoria acts not only as a playwright, but also as an organizer — in particular, the only in the Russian Far East festival of modern dramaturgy “Metadrama”. As the main playwright of Vladivostok, she concentrates the dramatic activity of the Far Eastern Russian theater: she writes the text for the promenade, supervises the laboratories, participates in the practices of post-dramatist.

Vera Serdechnaya, PhD Philology, theatre critic