BETWEEN DOCUMENTARY AND POST-DOCUMENTARY: SEARCH VECTORS OF CONTEMPORARY UKRAINIAN DRAMA

Abstract

The article discusses modern dramaturgical strategies, which consist in creating a transformative field by means of documentary/post-documentary. The purpose of the article is to demonstrate the search vectors of contemporary Ukrainian drama in the context of the connection between documentary and post-documentary aesthetics. "Post-documentary" becomes such a feature of liminal aesthetics, which manifests itself in its performative, active orientation to the understanding of reality through the document. The main features of post-documentary theater, identified by researchers, are the ability to bring to the fore the subject of the action, which records its own states "here and now" and turns the text into a performative event. With such an artistic strategy, the author realizes an approach to true reality, "preserves" the moment of creation, the fluid phase of "here and now", a unique moment that is valuable for its true imperfection. For a dramatic text, this can be realized in the inclusion of autobiographical material, in the metagenres of diary, notebook, letter, etc., and through the embodiment of a "draft aesthetic". "Draft aesthetics" is a contemporary strategy of "non-finito" as a type of artistic thinking and demonstrates conditional imperfection, incompleteness of the text, an open form that captures the variability, uniqueness, confusion of the subject's state of consciousness and realizes the performative nature of the dramatic text. The fixation of facts, characteristic of a document, becomes in the documentary a fixation of temporary fluid states of the character in the interpretation of events (past or present) in order to preserve and remember this liminal state. In contemporary Ukrainian drama, a field of frontier between documentary and post-documentary is being formed: playwrights, directors, drama and theater researchers raise issues of trust in the document, look for ways to find contemporary attitudes, artistic methods and techniques that would reflect the "truth of the fact", raise questions of artistic ethics regarding involvement of documentary sources. The crisis of the documentary is realized as a means of salvation in the post-documentary: playwrights embody for the recipient the maximum approximation to reality, which reflects the document as an object of artistic research.