The actors didn't want to listen to me, they interfered with my rehearsals, they made noise, they were loud. It was difficult to bring them to some kind of order, even though I had a microphone. But they may have been doing it unconsciously, I guess, because there was also this... actor's education was not quite professional and correct... And for me it was... such a gap between our theater, the Ukrainian theater in Mariupol, and the European theater. Because I often went to festivals and I saw rehearsals... I took my students to Poland for practice and I saw how they rehearse in theaters. What silence there is! How ready the actors are, how they are ready to go with the text they have learned, how they are ready to do what the director wants them to do at any moment... This is not the case here. When I said that they work like that and you don't, it was perceived as a personal insult... I was insulting the actors. It's all strange, it's all strange to me. Here. And I say, there were three months of staging, there was such a confrontation, the actors stopped greeting me, there was a certain boycott. ... But you can't bring me down. I knew why I was staging it. The play was dedicated to the 30th anniversary of Ukraine's independence. I staged it and it was a great success.
I remember how I used to come to Donetsk once a year, always to Donetsk region. I was always a "Banderite" there, and when I returned to Lviv, I can't say that everyone called me one of their own. For them, I was a "Muscovite.".... Behind the eyes, I'm not saying that they called me "Moskalka" to my face. And they called me "Banderovka" in the village, as if laughing, as a joke, but it was not a joke at all. And my child, who ran around me, was called a "Banderchik". It was just a thing, and I was not offended. I just always spoke Ukrainian. When I came to the village, in Sloviansk, I spoke Ukrainian. And they already had a surzhyk. And then I came to the conclusion that the further away from the day of the first declaration of Ukraine's independence, every year there was more and more Russian there. There was more and more "Russification" there. I was in the countryside last year, and very few people speak Ukrainian anymore. Few people speak Ukrainian, they all speak in Russian, a strange, strange surzhyk.
I didn't know who Stalin was. But in the first grade, when my teacher heard my voice singing, she taught me to sing "Suliko." And I was such a skinny girl, with white bows, white hair. I remember that I spent very little time in class, because they dragged me to all the concerts, put me on a chair, and I sang this "Suliko" without accompaniment, which was Stalin's favorite song. Although it was already 1971... Can you imagine that almost 20 (17) years have passed since Stalin's death, and the song "Suliko" was a big hit, and my teacher used me in this form, I was already an "artist" then.
Film director, actress, Honored Artist of Ukraine Liudmyla Kolosovych (née Dubnyk) was born on September 9, 1963 in the village of Bilbasivka, Sloviansk district, Donetsk region. Since childhood, she knew that in the future she would express herself and her views through art. From 1979 to 1983, she studied at the Dnipro State Theater School, where she graduated with honors and received a degree in puppetry. She started working as a leading actress at the Lviv Young Spectator Theater, where she spent almost 20 years of her life from 1983 to 2004. In 1996, she was awarded the honorary title of Honored Artist of Ukraine. From 2005 to 2008, she worked as an artist of the highest category at the Drama Theater of the Western Operational Command. In 2008, she received a diploma as a drama theater director and teacher. From 2009 to 2014 she was the artistic director of the Lesya Ukrainka Lviv Drama Theater. Since 2010, she has been teaching acting in Lviv, Kyiv, and Mariupol. Since 2014, as a freelance artist, she has staged productions in various Ukrainian drama theaters, and in 2019 she founded her own theater, Solo, which has successfully toured both Ukraine and the world. Since September 2022, she has worked as a stage director at the Donetsk Regional Music and Drama Theater (Mariupol), whose building was destroyed during the bombing in March 2022. Since May 2022, she has been the acting artistic director of the theater, which has been in evacuation in Uzhhorod since March 2022. She is actively involved in festival, cultural, educational and social activities. She has two children, a son and a daughter.
