Take the Rubbish Out, Sasha

Forum on European Culture

Programme editor

Sasha, a colonel in the Ukrainian army who died due to a heart failure, sees his widow Katia and his stepdaughter Oksana prepare his funeral feast. A year later, the country will be engulfed in the events that can make the dead rise. Sasha is ready to be resurrected, but his family is not. They are reluctant to bury him again.

In the series Endless February, Frascati Productions and De Balie offer a human face to the war in Ukraine. Contemporary Ukrainian plays are presented in collaboration with director Iana Gudzenko and actress Alesia Andrushevska.

In this third iteration of the collaboration, the magical realist play Take The Rubbish Out, Sasha is performed. Kiev-based playwright Natal’ya Vorozhbit wrote the play in 2014, when the Russian army annexed the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine. Within the year, the Russian army occupied the Crimea in Southern Ukraine.

About the creators

Iana Gudzenko studied drama in Kiev (master) and is an Alumnus of the European Theater Convention 2019/22. In the Netherlands she has collaborated with De Toneelmakerij, AJTS, De Krakeling and De Balie.

Alesia Andrushevska is a Ukrainian theater and film actress. She is a member of the National Union of Theater Workers of Ukraine. This season she stars in Women in Troy, as told by our mothers by Dood Paard.

Oksana Borbat was an ensemble actor in the Wild Theater in Ukraine from 2016 to 2019 and starred in more than 24 films. When the war broke out, she moved to Amsterdam where she visited and united friends and colleagues in the theatre.

Bram Gerrits graduated from the Academy of Drama in Eindhoven in 2005. Since then, he has played at Theater Utrecht and Toneelschuur productions, among others. He ran his own collective ‘the Flower of the Nation’ and appeared in several television series.

Mariia Ponomarova (Ukraine, 1991) was born and raised in Kiev, Ukraine. She is a film director and scriptwriter. She has worked in both documentary and fiction as a director and 1st AD. Mariia participated in the documentarists movement “Babylon’13 – cinema of civil protest” during the revolution in Ukraine.