The Hooligan Project
The Hooligan Project is a music-theatre performance devised and performed in collaboration with local participants (age 18-30) and staged in non-traditional spaces. It is inspired by the story of Simeon “Sam” Kyslyi (who performs in the piece), a Ukrainian actor who spent his teenage years as a football hooligan, fighting in brutal clashes against rival football supporters in forest clearings. At the same time he was studying to be an actor and would cover his bruises with make-up before going on stage at his local opera house to present evenings of music, poetry and dance.
Sam's story provides a window in to the violent subcultures that some teenage boys and young men resort to in search of a sense of belonging or to overcome fear. But the process by which the show is created in collaboration with the participants develops a parallel narrative about the attraction and power of groups. As they work on what Sam's story means to them, the participants discover their individual and collective voices, sharing their vulnerabilities and building confidence for self-expression in song, music, spoken-word and dance. The audience witnesses a new creative community emerge in delicate counterpoint to Sam's elegy for the hooligan firm of his youth.
The first edition of The Hooligan Project was created in Cornwall in 2024 in collaboration with Harbour Festival Redruth and The Pearl Exchange Bude. It was performed at The Ladder in the former archive rooms of the Passmore Edwards library. A 5-day creative workshop followed with students from the University of Highlands and Islands at Findhorn Bay Festival in collaboration with Mahogany Opera.
The Hooligan Project is inspired by our 2019 performance Hooligan. Research and development took place in March 2020 at Battersea Arts Centre in collaboration with Mahogany Opera's Various Stages and in residency at Britten Pears Arts in August 2023.
The Hooligan Project (Bude/Redruth) Director and Writer Peter Cant, Musical Director and Composer Jessie Maryon Davies, Performer and Writer Simeon Kyslyi, Choreographer Mathis Kleinschnittger, Percussionist Riccardo Castellani, Additional Dramaturgy Mathis Kleinschnittger, Performers Phe Crawford, Berenice Cruse, Jake Harvey, Hannah Jacobs, Lea Judge, Arion Kaspar, Scamp Niemz, Eggy Ray, Lighting and Sound Design Ciaran Clarke, Stage Technician Vicki Cox, Documentary Film and Editing Liubov Sliusareva, Project Co-Producer Cat Lake, Producer Peter Cant. Special thanks to Harbour Festival Felix Mortimer, Josh Nawras, Victoria Hole and Minnie Bunce and The Pearl Exchange Fliss Loxley, Thom Pennick and Silvie Ruscombe-King.
Body’s In Trouble
Hooligan Art Community X De Goot
O. Festival Rotterdam in collaboration with De Goot / The Young
Following 18 months of performing Bunker Cabaret across Europe in site-specific rooms which offered a porous connection with each city or town, we decided to take the approach even further by creating an installation in the centre of Rotterdam’s central shopping mall, KoopGoot, invited by Rotterdam’s O. Festival of Opera, Music and Theatre. As artists-in-residence we worked in a former retail unit with glass walls on two sides, making it possible for all passers-by to see in. Liubov Sliusareva’s central ‘field of joy’, a patch of grass and soil, lit with cinematic lighting, invited interaction from members of the public and from our performers, becoming at turns a stage or an exhibit; a plot of earth for nurture or a pitch for football and fighting. Elsewhere Liubov’s mirror images, ghostly reflections and fashion model avatars flickered into life or dominated 4K screens. Natalka Perchyshyna’s installation of construction lamps, blinder lights and electric candles alluded to the conflicting realities of "opera" in the mall. And live electronic composer Olesia Onykiienko took up residency in the kitchen. Self-styled as a “trapped house-wife” she live-sampled the running water and tea cups to create pastoral soundscapes that teetered on the verge of obliteration. The sound played from the former fitting rooms of the retail unit, the customary place to try on a new outfit or a new identity. Rehearsing and performing in the installation over the weeks were the Ukrainian actors and musicians Simeon Kyslyi and Marusia Ionova, Hooligan Art Community’s director Peter Cant and the musician and composer Jessie Maryon Davies. Pop-up performances took place during the residency in the retail unit and throughout the mall and at our launch event on Friday 17th May.
On the evening of Friday 24th May the public was invited to a sharing of the new musical material we developed during the residency. The set list included interpretations of Talking Heads’ “Life During Wartime”, Young Fathers’ “I Saw”, Mary Margaret O’Hara’s “Body’s In Trouble” and Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” and the original compositions “Opera Song”, “Alice. Mirror” and “Tea time / Spring Song”.
Thank you to all who came and supported us. The grass was lovingly rehomed.
Body’s in Trouble Sharing Devised and Performed by Simeon Kyslyi, Marusia Ionova, Olesia Onykiienko, Jessie Maryon-Davies, Liubov Sliusareva, Peter Cant and Catherine Lake. Installation Design Liubov Sliusareva and Natalka Perchyshyna, Video Design / Photography Liubov Sliusareva, Director Peter Cant, Musical Director Jessie Maryon Davies, Producers Catherine Lake and Peter Cant.
Bunker Cabaret
UK & European tour
Is there a War inside of me?
Combining music, poetry, dance and film, this unique theatre event is a powerful exploration of love versus totalitarianism and the personal conflicts of making art in a time of war. By turns ironic, raw, funny and devastating, the performance starkly reveals the artists’ individual experiences of the war while communicating a shared humanity, creating beautiful moments of connection between artists and audiences.
Two months after the full-scale invasion began, women from the company travelled from Ukraine to a residency in Germany, while two male members of the company remained in Ukraine, restricted by law from leaving the country. In spite of this the male actors worked together in a bomb-shelter in Kyiv, developing new scenes which would become the inspiration for Bunker Cabaret.
“They fill the large bare room with their warmth, turning the emptiness into a magical space for the imagination.“ - John Farndon, Off West End Theatre Awards
“Incredibly physical, highly musical and often very personal.” - Taz.de
“A paean to the fortitude of art in the hardest of conditions.“ - Index On Censorship
“Eloquent ferocity that you rarely see on the British stage.” - Dominic Cavendish
Bunker Cabaret premiered at Somerset House, London in September 2022 before embarking on an extensive tour of the UK and Europe. The show was invited to the prestigious Berliner Theatertreffen in Germany in 2023.
Bunker Cabaret Written and Created by Hooligan Art Community, Director Peter Cant, Performers Simeon Kyslyi, Danylo Shramenko, Marusia Ionova (2024-), Mirra Zhuchkova (2022-23), Movement Direction and Dramaturgical Consultant Mathis Kleinschnittger, Lighting Design Natalka Perchyshena, Video Artist Liubov Sliusareva, Costume Design Paul Kuraksin, Producers Peter Cant and Catherine Lake, Company Manager Catherine Lake, Vicki Cox (2023). Originally Produced at Somerset House in partnership with Andrea Ferran for Volta International Festival, created in residency at Somerset House, Britten Pears Arts, 101 Outdoor Arts and Old Diorama Arts Centre, Tour 2023 Supporters Mahogany Opera, Impossible Producing, Ukrainian Institute, British Council, The Foyle Foundation, Paul Hamlyn Foundation.
GRAIN
Residency at Wigan Pier in collaboration with Down To Earth and The Old Courts
In September 2023 we were invited to take up residency at the iconic Wigan Pier in Greater Manchester where we developed and shared material on the topic of ‘grain’. Inspired by the paintings of Kyiv-born artist Kazimir Malevich, Danylo performed a series of physical feats in an attempt to describe the effort exerted in grain’s cultivation and production. His movements evoked the threshold between our crop-dependent world and our hunter-gatherer past. They also alluded to the personal thresholds of living through war: a body caught between the effort of rising and the shock of falling. Performance research is continuing on this topic in response to russia’s obscene tactic of weaponizing grain by targeting Ukraine’s production and exports with the intent to exhaust, starve and kill.
Grain Performer Danylo Shramenko, Director Peter Cant, Movement Director Mathis Kleinschnittger, Video Artist Liubov Sliusareva. Sound Technician Phil Saunders, Residency supported by Down To Earth and The Old Courts. An earlier phase of research and development took place in residency at Hellerau, Dresden.
BIZHENKA
or Hooligan: Bizhenka
WUK Theater Quartier, Halle, Germany
Bizhenka (Ukrainian for “female refugee”) was created and performed by Hooligan Art Community with a community chorus of displaced Ukrainian people and local participants at WUK Theater Quartier in Halle, Germany on the 5th May 2022 at 20:00. The project, conceived in response to russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine, aimed to keep creative and social connections alive while bringing artists and communities together in safety and solidarity.
“Approaching the river you realise there is something in it. You don’t think it has to do with the performance, just something coming by, by chance. It looks more and more like a dead body. Then you realise if it is a dead body it’s the body of a human. Then it starts to move. You start to think, maybe it’s part of the show. This body turns out to be a person, or a ghost, fully clothed, not dressed like a swimmer. It is in a dress, a dress like a ghost would wear. A person – or a spirit – or an allegory of something. And the spirit steps out of the river, the river which is flowing past us, where we stand under the bridge. The flowing of the water is suddenly a metaphor of something passing by, like time. And the person who turns out to be part of the show stands there in front of the public, on the shore, like a statue. She’s a statue and the river flows.
"Suddenly this person starts to move crazily, making movements in all directions, dancing, agitated. She tries to climb up the bridge. Then she seems appalled by something and wants the audience to follow her. Without speaking she guides the people into place.
"The place is a place made by people – there are buildings, it’s industrial. A place like a place in a painting by Chirico, the deserted landscape of a city. And there, suddenly, appearing out of the blue from all corners, masked people come, moving in an organised way doing everything in the same rhythm and co-ordinated towards some invisible aim. It is uncanny and violent. From here the spirit guides us into the house through several doorways, through a labyrinth of corridors, ending up in a space like a womb, which is divided into two spheres - one is the presenting space, and the other is for the audience. There is an active specimen and a passive specimen looking at the active specimen. They produce different kinds of actions with voice and without voice. And it is finished with a monologue by the spirit. Her monologue tries to bring everything together in certain images – the present, the past and the future. “
Descriptive text by Geoffrey Layton. Photos by Liubov Sliusareva and Nikita Skopincev
Bizhenka Performers in Halle Yulia Linnik, Matilda Marina, Sofia Yevmina, Daria Veshtak, Mirra Zhuchkova Community Chorus Daria Kvietkina, Lisa-Marie Halwax, Kateryna Sokolova, Nastya Sokolova, Luisa Mackrodt, Ivan Prodanyk, Teresa Finke, Yevheniia Maksimova, Elisabeth Hacker, Mikhail Achkinazi, Lucifer Gudzon, AnnieK Röseler, Victoria Uvarova, Ada Biljan, Performers in Kyiv Simeon Kyslyi, Danylo Shramenko, Volodymyr Rudenko, Director Peter Cant, Musical Director Jessie Maryon Davies, Movement Director Mathis Kleinschnittger, Lighting designer Nataliya Perchyshyna, Video and Set Designer Liubov Sliusareva, Costume Designer Paul Kuraksin, Interpreter Vladyslava Yezlovetska, Produced by Peter Cant / Hooligan Art Community and Mahogany Opera in collaboration with Dnipro Centre for Contemporary Culture, Realised by WUK Theater Quartier and Netzwerk Freier Theater, Funded by British Council in the frame of the UK/UA-season and by the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media Special thanks Ponderosa, Diana Baydun, Liza Orliuk
RADIATION
Presented by Kosmos Tabir at Ex - 2c1b, Podil, Kyiv, Ukraine on 17, 18, 19 December 2021
RADIATION is a ghost show, a catastrophe show, a collage show, about a familiar yet unfamiliar world, reconstructed from an archive of records and texts, from the pages of literature, from our memory and imagination. Using performance, movement, lighting, live video and live electronic music, the team immerses itself in personal and collective stories, forming a digital "TV studio in the head", catastrophe as a state of being: present and future.
Radiation Written and Devised by Hooligan Art Community, Performers Danylo Shramenko and Mirra Zhuchkova, Director Peter Cant, Live Electronic Composer Olesia Onykiienko; Lighting Design Natalka Perchyshyna, Video Design Liubov Sliusareva, Dramaturgy Eloise Lally, Movement Direction Mathis Kleinschnittger, Costume Design Paul Kuraksin, Produced by Danylo Shramenko and Peter Cant in association with Kosmos Tabir, Supported by i-Portunus and British Council (Taking the Stage 2.0), Communications Bohdan Yaremchuk, Developed in residency at Dnipro Centre of Contemporary Culture (DCCC) in collaboration with Dakh Centre for Contemporary Art / Gogolfest / Andrii Palatnyi
"When you get closer to the actors, adrenaline is injected into your blood, as if you are watching a street fight. [Radiation] is about how difficult it is to show love and tenderness in a dirty, empty, dying, hypocritical, atomized world... to carry your love and tenderness through all this mess, not for the sake of a high goal or a beautiful dream, but because there is no other way." - Serhiy Mykhalchuk on Radiation
HOOLIGAN
Mystetskyi Arsenal
Kyiv 17-18 July 2019
HOOLIGAN is based on the true story of actor Simeon Kyslyi’s teenage years as a football hooligan in eastern Ukraine, during which he fought against rival football-supporters in brutal battles for victory and honour. Pursuing his dream of being an actor, Simeon left his hooligan life behind to study at drama school in Kyiv. He never fought again.
The show, performed immersively at sunset in the cavernous halls of Mystetskyi Arsenal, mixes documentary theatre with choral song, pop, punk, poetry, mime, dance and live electronic music to unpick violence, youth, rebellion and gender roles in Ukraine today. Texts drawn from interviews with Simeon are collaged and juxtaposed with images, text and characters from John Milton’s seventeenth century poem Paradise Lost, including the figure of Satan, a fallen angel with his own history of rebellion.
In the performance, the hooligan (Simeon Kyslyi) ritually opens the door to his past, and the audience is invited to follow him through it. Satan (Danylo Shramenko) appears on the other side, flanked by a chorus of balaclava-clad fates; a hooligan chorus. The devil assumes the role of Simeon’s guide, shadow and opponent in a battle for the hooligan’s soul. Mirra Zhuchkova plays the rebel narrator, inhabiting a number of characters drawn from the post-soviet era of her childhood. She interrupts and comments on the action, portraying lives reflected in the folk-song stylings of soviet troubadour Vladimir Vsotskyi: kitchen culture, freedom protests, cheap cigarettes and vodka.
What has the power to unite us? Why is it so much easier to unite against something than for something? What does it mean to rebel today, as an individual or as a group? And in the group will you find yourself or lose yourself?
Hooligan was featured among the top theatre of the decade by LB News lb.ua/culture.
In May 2020 Deutsches Theater Berlin commissioned an original film based on the performance for Radar Ost, filmed in Ukraine during the Covid pandemic.
Hooligan Devised and Performed by Simeon Kyslyi, Danylo Shramenko, Mirra Zhuchkova Hooligan Chorus Sofia Baskakov, Kateryna Dioment, Igor Dymov, Sasha Indik, Liora Kotlyar, Volodymyr Rudenko, Olga Tsitsilinskaya, Pavlo Prymak Director Peter Cant, Musical Director Jessie Maryon Davies, Lighting Designer Natalka Perchyshyna, Live Electronic Composer and Sound Designer Olesia Onykiienko, Costume Designer Paul Kuraksin, Stage Manager Kate Andrienko, Producers Danylo Shramenko, Peter Cant, Project Manager Bodya Yaremchuk, Organisational Partners Mystetskyi Arsenal, Culture Bridges, Dakh Contemporary Centre of Arts, Kosmos Tabir Coordinator of Theatre Projects for Mystetskyi Arsenal Maria Voronchuk, Special Thanks Anastasiia Haishenetc, Anna Bubnova, Viktor Derkach, Kyrylo Pryadko, Merien Morey, Kate Gornostai, Marfa Quariltod, Andrii Palatnyi. Developed in residency with Startup Gogolfest at Tu Mariupol, Mariupol and at Mystetskyi Arsenal, Kyiv, supported by Culture Bridges.