A Stage for Healing: How Theater Helped Ukraine’s War Refugees Feel at Home

In the shadow of war, where politics fail and propaganda thrives, something unexpected happened in Lviv: a play began.

In 2015, actors from the Les Kurbas Theatre launched a powerful initiative called Hra v nas (A Play in Us), aiming to help internally displaced persons (IDPs) from Crimea and Eastern Ukraine find a new sense of belonging in a city that felt both welcoming and strange. As Anna Korzeniowska-Bihun writes in her article, this project wasn’t just about theater—it was about survival, identity, and building bridges where borders had torn people apart​Lwowski projekt teatral….

The participants—refugees and locals alike—underwent intensive acting workshops not to become professional performers, but to reconnect with their bodies, their voices, and one another. Through movement, voice exercises, shared stories, and poetic texts, strangers became collaborators, and trauma became material for art.

The result was Labirynt, a poetic performance stitched together from classical Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar texts. Later came 21 Naked Voices, where suitcases on stage transformed into metaphors of displacement and longing. The stage wasn’t just a space of expression—it became a new kind of home.

Theater here acted as anthropological defense—a way to resist the division sown by war, language, and propaganda. It reminded people that being a refugee didn’t mean being voiceless. And for some, like a Crimean Tatar woman who found the courage to pursue acting studies, it was even a new beginning.

Hra v nas didn’t end with applause. It sparked the founding of Teatr Domus by two participants, a community-based troupe that continues to bring newcomers and locals together, building empathy performance by performance.

Full article (in Polish): Konteksty Kultury Medialnej, 2018