Fall on Pluto

Opening night October 2016, Lvov Lesya Ukrainka Theatre, Lviv (UA)
Running time 80 minutes. No intermission. 
In Ukrainian, with Slovenian subtitles. 

A discussion with the creative team after the first performance. 

Concept, dramaturgy, director Sashko Brama
Coauthors of concept and dramaturgy Maria Bakalo, Andre Erlen
Puppetry Oksana Rossol, Oleksandr Sergiienko
Sound designer Timur Gogitidze
Sound recording, remastering Faust
Lighting designer Volodymyr Fanta
Photography, visual designer Marjana Klochko
Programming Dmytro Makara
Technical director Serhii Chervonyi
Expert consultant of the project Viktoria Bryndza

Cast
Danilo Hromov, Kseniia Arnaut, Isabel Merkulova, Nadiia Kalyniuk, Marharyta Pidluzhna, Viktor Dikiy

Featured topics: aging, mortality, longing, detachment, compassion, documentary theatre, puppets 

Before 2006, Pluto was the most distant planet of our solar system. We now know it is too small to be considered a planet, so somewhere on the lonesome frontier, it is falling out of the family of planets. Its position in the shade certainly doesn’t bother the other planets of the solar system, so the autumn of life there would indeed be hidden to the eyes, similar to a life in a retirement home. 
The creators of the production spent a year socialising and talking to the residents of such an (ostracised) home in Lviv, Ukraine. They found a meaningful way to integrate their experience into an art project that focuses on the topic of endless human longing for a better world and, in a multi-media concept intertwining documentary, puppet, performative and sound and ambience theatre conveys what the artists said, heard and experienced there. The project wants to give a voice to elderly – symbolically and literally (by using original sound recordings in the production) – and place them in the centre of the society, where, as the young team believes, they belong. In Ukraine, 16 percent of the population is older than 65, that is seven million people – seven million voices that we have to hear, seven million stories. In the production, they are represented by puppets Marina, Miroslav, Vencheslav and Zhenya with the voices of the residents Svitlana Lysinska, Andria Buchko, Yur Syluk and Mark Banko, selected from around one hundred elderly interviewees who were prepared to share their life stories publicly. 
Fall on Pluto invites the spectators to face their own fears, to the merciless encounter with dementia, which as a society, we don’t like to discuss. It deals with life values from the point of view of a person that succumbed to time and is caught in pain and memories. Not dead yet, but no longer living, either. 

With support by Goethe-Institut (UA), British Counsil (UA), City Lviv