The Reckoning Begins: Thoughts from our Artistic Director Josephine Burton
Last year as I watched the awful news continue to roll in from Ukraine and felt helpless, my friends told me about an organisation that they'd been involved in setting up, The Reckoning Project. They gather witness testimonies from survivors of detentions, torture and shelling. The team are working with lawyers and journalists to collect stories that can be submitted as evidence in court. However, what really captured my attention and fired my imagination was what cofounder Nataliya Gumenyuk said as she introduced the project to me. She explained that realistically very few of these heartrending testimonies would actually be heard in court. The lawyers will build a case for crimes against humanity or genocide with specific elements found in the 300 individual stories. And yet every individual experience they recorded has been life changing. These are untold stories that need to be heard, and the lives lost need to be memorialised. I felt that this was how I could provide some help.
Ukrainian playwright Anastasiia Kosodii and I have been reading transcripts of the recordings, and exploring ways to ensure they can be heard, widely. The approach the journalists use to conduct the interview is pretty unique, informed by what evidence the lawyers have told them they'd like to gather and the care that trauma therapists have advised they embed in their line of questioning. The interviews are long. Very long. We started the week lost in them. And were also concerned about our ability to hold their emotional weight, particularly those stories which had empathetic resonance for us such as stories from Anastasiia's home town or stories of children of a similar age to mine. We invited a wellbeing practitioner, Lou Platt, to help us so that we might feel supported whilst being still able to be activated emotionally by the material. She gave us some amazing tips to look after ourselves and also insights into what might be going on for the interviewees as they recall and tell their stories. And slowly we discussed the testimonies, what parts moved us, which specific quotes landed particularly strongly. And began to draw out topics and themes which came up regularly across the interviews.
Some of the stories were quite humorous – the interviewees regularly expressed bemusement that the Russians stole electric kettles without the stands – emphasising the Russian envy and ignorance at surprisingly everyday gadgets. Others share similar reflections on the methods and techniques they used emotionally to survive the experience they went through. And all of them contained incredible stories of ordinary heroes – trying to do good and be kind amidst the horror around them.
We chatted extensively to The Reckoning Project Team in Ukraine to gain further insights into the testimonies and their interview approach. Anastasiia and I discussed the different ways we might tell the story, exploring whether that should be with 1 key figure or with many different individuals from the stories, whether we use verbatim script and in which languages. And gradually we started to see a way forward.
It's still the beginning of the process. However, our next stop is Berlin in September, when we’ll piece together the dramaturgy based on some of the decisions we’re making that limit the copious content. It’s a strange sensation to emerge from a week of reading such devastating testimony with the synaps-buzzing exhilaration that marks the creation of a new work. Lou introduced Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s 5 stages of grief to us and told us about David Kessler’s additional sixth stage, the act of ‘meaning making’. I do very much hope that with The Reckoning we’ll make some meaningful contribution to an understanding of the war and its impact.
