Our Kupala Brighton project has two birthplaces: a park in Brighton and a village in the middle of Ukraine. Last summer we connected the two, travelling nearly 3,000 kilometres across Europe to get there, and came back with a deepened sense of purpose.
At the edge of Preston Park, two successive Kupala midsummer festivals inspired us to explore Ukrainian traditional culture and how it is being reshaped to meet Ukrainians’ needs today. At the edge of the village of Trubaitsi, we found our way to the universal themes on which our project is now focused: nature, land, place and belonging.
The project also focuses on helping non-Ukrainians find ways to connect with Ukraine, a challenge that grows more complicated and elusive the further we get from the shock of the monstrous Russian invasion in 2022.
Inspired by childhood memories
Back then, in Preston Park, I had the advantage of familiarity. Having grown up around a Polish exile community that used song, dance, costume and customs to sustain the nation abroad while the homeland remained oppressed by an imperial power, then known as the Soviet Union, I felt that I could see what the newly-arrived Ukrainians were doing. Their dances, costume and songs were similar to the Polish ones I remembered fondly from childhood – and the imperial oppressor was the same, though its name had changed.
That first celebration was led by Vladyslava Bondar, who had come to Sussex as a refugee under the Homes for Ukraine scheme, working with other members of the new community that the festival helped to bring together. She was inspired to take on the role by her memories of Trubaitsi, the village where her grandparents lived.
It was the place where she celebrated Kupala festivals, which were revived in Ukraine after the country gained its independence in 1991, and the place that enchanted her childhood imagination. As a child she immersed herself in the natural habitats that surrounded the village, and populated them with folkloric beings. In her daydreams she made friends with rusalkas, female water spirits, who lived in the wetland behind the screen of reeds at its edge.
Returning home – a place changed by war
After crossing nearly 1,000 kilometres of Ukraine and what seemed like several thousand potholes on the roads from Kyiv, Vladyslava recalled those charming fantasies as she and I sat in front of the reeds and recorded a conversation about the place we had finally reached. Going there was a tour, a trek, a pilgrimage and, for Vladyslava, a return home.
Now, she observed, the reeds grew less tall and the wetlands had been damaged, by fire and cultivation. The water was harder to find, and the rusalkas’ presence in it harder to imagine – not just because their habitat was diminished, but also because they were overshadowed by the reverberating memory of the enemy drones that had passed overhead during the night.
At dawn I was awoken by a roll of distant explosions, a salvo of cruise missiles striking a city not far from the village where Vladyslava’s parents live. I took the opportunity to walk out to the edge of the reeds and record some peaceful ambient nature sound, once the noise of a passing jet had faded away.
Although air raid sirens bellow frequently in her parents’ village, Hradyzk, Vladyslava hadn’t expected her British friends to hear the signs of war in Trubaitsi, deep in the countryside. My partner Sue and I quickly learned to follow the locals’ example and carry on as if we couldn’t hear them.
Vladyslava recalled how surreal it had felt to hear a siren break the silence there, as she made a farewell visit before leaving for England, in the peaceful place where she had swum, walked, cycled and picked herbs with her childhood friends.
This was a place that shaped her and which contains much of her most precious personal history; a place to which she belongs, and which belongs to her. As she pointed out, other Ukrainians must also have personal homelands that would be taken away if Ukraine were to submit to American pressure and give up territory for the sake of a bogus peace deal.
Connecting communities
We returned to England with a video recording of the conversation in Trubaitsi and an epic trail of images which we’ll use to help non-Ukrainians see Ukraine in new ways. That, we hope, will help them connect with Ukrainians here; and the stories we tell will help them turn their sympathy, which by now has become somewhat distanced, into empathy.
Our aim is to bring Ukrainians and non-Ukrainians together in a community around those universally resonant themes of nature, land, place and belonging.
The traditional calendar, with midsummer at its centre, will provide a frame for our activities, and the Sussex countryside offers open space for them. We have an expert guide: Dr Matt Pope, who teaches archaeology at University College London, and values the power of landscape to connect people with the places in which they find homes.
We also have a natural home at the Rose Hill arts venue, not far from the park where Kupala first appeared in Brighton, which has welcomed Ukrainians at a series of events since 2022. The next of these will be our live debut, Silence and Sirens, in which we’ll show images from our trip and start to bring our new community together, just before midsummer.
For more information on Kupala Brighton, see kupalabrighton.org, Instagram @kupalabrighton and Bluesky @kupalabrighton.bsky.social
Silence and Sirens: A journey to a village in Ukraine from a park in Brighton, The Rose Hill, Brighton BN1 4JL, Thursday June 18, 7pm–11pm.
Proceeds from Silence and Sirens will go to Stand for U, the local Ukrainian humanitarian charity that sends vehicles to evacuate civilians from frontline territories in Ukraine.
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