About Alina
Alina Zievakova is a Ukrainian actress who is originally from Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine but now lives in Kyiv. Since Russia invaded Ukraine this past February, she has been using theater as an act of resistance and as a way to help others process their trauma and wartime experiences. She works with a theater called Pro English Drama School. When the full scale invasion began, the theater served as a shelter. But now, Alina is back to performing plays and leading workshops.
In this conversation, Alina tells us about her life during the war – everything from the first day of the invasion, her choice not to leave, love during wartime and her hopes for the future. She also shares her experience collecting testimony from her fellow Ukrainians and working as a fixer with foreign journalists (she speaks 7 languages). She talks about bearing witness to the war while struggling to survive herself and about how she insists on sharing what she’s seen, even when her own family doesn't believe her.
Alina and I recorded this conversation on July 20, 2022 through Zoom. I was in Portland, Maine and she was in Kyiv, Ukraine.
Bloom in Violence
Bloom in Violence is a performance created in Ukraine in the recent times of extreme violence. Violence against women is a topic that is located in silence or revealed in traumas, anger, protests. And so women are kept hostages in this violence, are objects, territory of eternal war. When we speak of violence, we manifest it, we shout, we want to be noticed, heard. But maybe what we are really looking for is how to heal, how to become full and complete human beings again. We felt the need to offer a woman the space where she can finally be seen in all her shapes, in her fragility and in her power, where this conversation with the world finally happens. Click here for more.