Contemporary story ballet performance is very demanding in its choice of literary source material. It needs many components: vivid imagery, emotionality and opportunity for a free, authorial reading. In my opinion, the immortal story by Mykola Hohol, written back in 1833, perfectly meets all these criteria. The vividness of characters, the stunning antagonistic merging of the real and phantasmagoric worlds, the absence of a trail of interpretations in ballet history - that's why Viy captivated me as a choreographer and director!

I have never taken on such a mystical story, which, on the one hand, is a challenge, and, on the other hand, an opportunity to find new words of plasticity, sentences, and paragraphs in myself as an artist.

Another important reason for addressing to the work of Mykola Hohol was a gift from fate in the form of a musical suite by composer Oleksandr Rodin, which the author introduced to me back in September 2018. It immediately became clear to me that I had no right to miss out on the "right of the first night" when it comes to music that is so devastatingly theatrical and, in a good way, balletic. Since the suite was not long enough for a full performance, Rodin agreed to complete the missing material. Like a child waiting for Christmas presents, I was waiting for new fragments of the musical score to appear!