Ukrainian Euromaidan as Social and Cultural Performance // Revolution and War in Contemporary Urhaine.The Challenge of Change, Olga Bertelsen (ed.), ibidem-Verlag, Stuttgart, 2016, p.161 - 179. (original) (raw)

The Ukrainian Euromaidan of 2013-2014 represents both political and aesthetic phenomena, a space of socio-cultural performance where new kinds of identities were constructed -national, social, political and gender. The perception and consideration of the Euromaidan through the prism of the performance theory does not suggest a reduction of the political and ideological substance of the Ukrainian revolution. But, through the means of pseudoaesthetical discourses, its opponents attempt to obscure the perfomative aspect of the Euromaidan by diminishing the political aspects of this phenomenon of civic protest and emphasizing the purely theatrical and entertaining nature of the Euromaidan that occurred in the center of Kyiv. 1 One Russian blogger emphatically claimed that the Maidan was a performance because "'maidowns,' 2 to be more precise, their inspirers were concerned a great deal with the appearance of the Maidan and the behavioral code of its participants to impress their European sponsors and the liberal [liberastvuiushchaiia] public." According to this blogger, for this purpose all necessary elements of performance were at play at the Maidan: the spectators who were in fact the overseers --"sponsors" and "liberasty," the stage ("time, place, and the aesthetics of these ugly tents, tires, and garbage . . . all the conditions were preserved"), the actors (Ukrainian politicians who behaved "like People's