Bouquet Kyiv Stage Festival in its 8th year, is itself an act of resistance.
by Julian Knysh
Aug. 24, 2025
Kyiv Post
Kyiv is not an easy city to imagine as the heart of Europe. Too many maps through history – imperial, Soviet and even modern – have tried to push it to the edges, to the margins. Yet one needs only to stand in the gardens of the thousand-year-old Saint Sofia Cathedral this August when the “Kyiv Bouquet Stage Festival” unfolds, to directly understand the claim made by its curators: “The heart of Europe beats here.”
It is not a metaphor designed for comfort. A heart that keeps beating under bombardment, a heart that remembers its dead year upon year, a heart that insists on joy even while wounded. This is not Europe of glossy brochures or touristic entertainments and cliches. It is Europe at its most vital, most vulnerable, and most real.
Over four days, more than 40 events were staged, including contemporary art, photographic exhibitions, fashion performance, jazz, orchestral, electronic music, bandura ensemble, and a film festival within the festival.
While the anticipated Trump-Putin summit took place, air raid alerts kept sounding in Kyiv, with the closest shelter a few hundred meters down the road at the Golden Gates Metro station. Musicians, performers, and audience alike remained defiant. Festivals like this support the front lines and at the same time represent what russia wishes to erase and what the soldiers at the front are fighting to preserve.
Memory as resistance
The festival begins with a ritual. Beneath a Chervona Kalyna – red viburnum bush, planted in 2022 to commemorate artists killed in the full-scale invasion, the Youth Choir of M. Lysenko Kyiv State Music Lyceum sang “Prayer for Ukraine” as actress Mariia Koval placed flowers at the base of the tree and watered them into the roots, as if memory itself was being cultivated into fruit. Then symbolically she presented a flower from the main bouquet to audience participants so we each may bloom and never forget.
Remembrance is not passive. It is an act of defiance against erasure. To honor the murdered poet or the silenced composer is to deny the invader their second victory – that of forgetting.
Festival cofounder Evgenii Utkin puts it bluntly: “Many artists gave their lives for European values. We continue their work here, together. Because the heart of Europe beats in Ukraine.”
To speak of values at all in such a setting is to restore a word that in Brussels and Berlin has grown tired, bureaucratic, and abstract. Here, it is vital and literal. People die for it.
The last outpost of light
Inside Sofia’s Khlibnia hall, the exhibition ”Ukraine: The Last Outpost of Light” gathers twenty-eight contemporary artists from all over Ukraine. Their works are not cries of despair but radiations of clarity. Tetiana Savchenko, the curator, describes them as “Pixels of creativity composing a portrait of a nation that refuses to vanish. Almost mythic – an outpost of light – besieged yet luminous. Here, to create is to hold a line.
Visionary artist Oleksandr Dubovyk’s iconic abstract image of a bouquet is also a keyhole. It is the symbol of this year’s festival. An invitation through a portal unlocking perception into the new.
This shape cut from large mirrors was placed around the grounds so you can see yourself in all that that means.
Conversations beneath the Ash tree
If exhibitions ground the festival in reflection and contemplation, the dialogues open it outward. Seven conversations under the Ash Tree brought together artists, thinkers, and activists to confront words often avoided in polite cultural gatherings: genocide, cultural diplomacy, survival, the continuing need for cultural education in a war for identity, an identity of which so much was lost.
British-French actor Edward Ackroyd warned of the danger in treating Ukrainian art as “local color.” Unless it enters school curricula and European museum collections, Europe itself will remain blind to part of its own body.
There is still a long way to correcting and rewriting the russian-centric narrative in Western institutions.
Oleksandra Matviichuk, Nobel Prize winner, featured both in the film Culture Vs War and a photo exhibition of great cultural ambassadors that encircled the cathedral building, spoke of the need for education on human rights, so society is strengthened in defending itself both from external and internal threats.
One could sense while listening that this was less a symposium and more a civic ritual. A vital act of creativity itself. Polyphonic, improvisational, urgent. Europe’s fate is debated not in parliaments but under trees in the garden.
Resurrecting silenced music
The question was raised, many people know of the authors who were part of the Executed Renaissance. How many people, both in Ukraine and abroad, have heard of the composers who were killed?
A haunting yet dynamic strand of the program was “Liberated Music” – the survival of scores by Ukrainian composers silenced by Stalin’s purges. Their manuscripts, hidden in archives for nearly a century, were brought to life to the public ear. Cultural scholar Viktoria Zubenko
described the project as “an act of justice.” In these recovered notes, one hears not only melodies but interrupted lives, fragments of a cultural lineage nearly severed.
The evening reached its crescendo with Roman Hryhoryi’s “Songs of the Unborn.” Standing atop a shard of metal from a russian rocket, he conducted a ritual for futures lost, voices never born, yet still insistently sung. The music merged choir, orchestra, and electronics into a lament and incantation – the very sound of survival.
The garden as stage
An emblematic performance took place not in a hall but on the grass in Conversations with Birds, a unique collaboration between ensembles Chorea Kozatska, Yevshan Ziliiya & Slovo and Holos (Word and Voice)
In the text and performance, birds are the interlocutors between heaven and earth. Something at once mystical and at the same time so normal in the way Ukrainians celebrate the moment of life while confronting death every day.
Barefoot actors in radiant baroque-inspired costumes offered apples and grapes to the audience while the music blends Ukraine’s rich baroque history with folk traditions, spiritual chant, and the poetry of Skovoroda.
Director Natalia Polovynka called the cathedral garden the perfect stage under open skies. It was a metaphor made flesh: a culture not hidden in vaults but lived, generous, abundant even in war.
It was not lost how, in the garden, birds flew in over the audience, flitting from branch to branch as if invoked by and participating in the music.
Veterans theater
Excerpts of Kotliarevsky’s Eneida – A mock-heroic parody of Virgil’s Aeneid, considered one of the first literary epic poems published in the modern Ukrainian language, were presented as a musical and movement performance by The Theatre of Veterans.. The actors, a theatre group of soldier veterans who had sustained heavy injuries and amputations. The choreography accounting for prosthetic limbs was set by Olha Semnoshkina, ballet master of the Ivan Franko National Theatre
After the performance director & Armed Forces veteran Akhtem Seitabaliev and the actors gave a talk about the critical role of arts in veterans’ rehabilitation.
Kobzari
The Kobzari – the ancient tradition of Ukraine’s wandering blind minstrels who for over some hundreds of years played the lira, kobza, starosvitska bandura, which in the 1920s evolved into modern bandura with over 60 strings. Earlier this year, it was listed as unique cultural heritage under threat by the UNESCO World Heritage Committee. Our Kobzars recite the Dumas – Ukraine’s epic prose poems that echo throughout its turbulent history. They painstakingly have managed to find fragments of a tradition nearly completely eradicated by russia and, with
meticulous research, have recreated and preserved this unique form that is the cradle of Ukrainian culture and identity.
Taras Komapnichenko says: “Art in Ukraine has a mission. It is nation-building.”
Culture vs war
A film festival within the festival.
A person is the result of culture in the broadest sense, the cultural landscape in which he is born, grows up, is brought up,” Akhtem Seitablaiev said.
Produced by Andriy Rizol, Culture Vs War is itself a full-length feature documentary and ongoing series project of short films and documentaries. An artistic study about Ukrainian artists who defend the country and create new meanings of Ukrainian culture
With over 100 screening events around Ukraine, the films have traveled from frontline areas to the European Parliament and capitals around the world.
Short films from the series Culture Vs War and Kadim Tarasov’s new film War, Through the eyes of animals.
My Dear Theo, With Love From the Front, directed by war veteran Alisa Kovalenko, recently won the Human Rights Award at Dokufest International Documentary and Short Film festival, Kosovo. She documented life at the front through her service in an assault unit while recording video messages for her young son, in case she did not return. She wants her film to be a bridge of memory between parents and children, and the memories to be a source of light in dark times, despite the pain.
White Bouquet – Kyiv Camerata Orchestra
Kyiv Camerata Orchestra gave a rousing finale featuring soloist Bohdana Pivnenko generous violin, conducted by Nikoloz Rachveli. The historic Georgian connection and solidarity towards parallel struggles of independence and reclamation of roots of European values were well represented.
For “Oh, Happiness from the opera Eter” Viktoriia Poliova scored the vocal notes higher than possible for the human voice, and as the cello harmonizes and supports vocalist Maryana Holovko’s aspiration is itself transformed into light.
The Bouquet as Europe
The festival takes its name from a simple metaphor. A bouquet is a gathering of flowers, each distinct, forming a whole greater than its parts.
For co-founder Utkin this is not only what the festival represents but Ukraine’s vision for Europe. Not a melting pot of technocratic union but a bouquet. A rose, daisy, sunflower, a burdock – different, even contradictory, but indispensable. The gift of the bouquet is it should be given from the heart in purity – you don’t think of a return on investment when you give it.
This is the generosity and vitality that distinguishes and contrasts Ukrainians from the aggressor.
The beating heart
When co-founder Iryna Budanska declares that “The heart of Europe is here,” wounded, bleeding, but true, honest, resilient, she names a paradox. How can a heart damaged still sustain the body?
Perhaps because the healing of damage produces vitality. Europe, long complacent in its peace, finds in Ukraine the reminder of its own origins, culture forged not in comfort but in confrontation with darkness.
To participate in Bouquet Kyiv Stage is to feel the paradox. To mourn and to celebrate, to remember and to anticipate, to hear silence broken and songs reborn. To recognize that culture is not an ornament but a vital organ. That Ukraine cannot be marginalized, and, to understand at last what it means to say “The Heart of Europe beats in Kyiv”
The sensitivity and joy of the packed audiences was a triumph in the face of russia’s brutality.
Bouquet Kyiv Stage took place Aug.14-17 in the UNESCO World Heritage national Conservation area Saint Sofia Kyiv.