🇪🇺 TEEN European Digital Community: Pine on a cliff from Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine

Pine on a cliff

I was born in 2004 in Ivano-Frankivsk, a city cradled by mountains and rivers that whisper ancient secrets. At six, I discovered magic in dance, languages, and swimming, sensing rhythms invisible to others. By twelve, I began writing, weaving imagination and ambition like spells. School brought gold medals and triumphs in biology Olympiads, while the war left shadows that strengthened me. Now, as a biochemistry student, I seek magic in molecules, enzymes, and ATP, turning curiosity into discovery. My life is a dance of knowledge and wonder, where even darkness carries light within.

The soil / the need

When I first came closer to theatre, I did not yet know the word theatre. I was six, perhaps seven. I only knew that something invisible had opened a crack in the surface of the world.
It began not with a stage, but with a screen – with Coraline. I remember the blue darkness of the room, the strange tenderness of fear, the beauty of something slightly terrifying. That film did not simply entertain me; it initiated me. It whispered that behind the visible layer of things there exists another corridor, another door, another mother, another self. It suggested that reality is porous. That one may step through.
Soon after, there was a puppet theatre. Small figures suspended by threads, yet more alive than many adults I had met. I remember watching their fragile wooden bodies move under the light, and I felt an almost sacred confusion: how could something artificial breathe more truthfully than ordinary life? I sensed that the strings were not limitations but veins through which meaning flowed. That was perhaps my first lesson – that artifice can be a vessel for revelation.
I had already known the stage through dance. I knew the discipline of rehearsal, the geometry of movement, the pulse of music beneath the ribs. But theatre was different. Dance was the body in motion; theatre was the soul made visible. Around eight years old, I played a role in a Christmas performance. I do not remember every line, yet I remember the silence before stepping out – that suspended second in which the world seems to hold its breath. In that instant, I was not a child pretending. I was a threshold.
It would be easy to say that I was looking for applause, or attention, or approval. But that would be untrue. What I was missing at that time was something far quieter and far more essential: I was looking for a space where my inner intensity would not need to be reduced.
Even as a child, I felt too much. Emotions did not pass through me; they inhabited me. Joy, fear, longing, anger – they arrived not as visitors but as rulers. The ordinary world often seemed unequipped to hold such magnitude. Theatre, however, did not ask me to dilute anything. It invited excess. It sanctified exaggeration. It allowed grief to be vast, love to be luminous, struggle to be mythic.
Very early, I understood that I wanted to belong to this realm – not as a spectator alone, but as a participant in its alchemy. I wanted to stand inside the machinery of illusion and feel it turning. I wanted to borrow the skin of other beings and discover which parts of them were secretly mine. Even now, I live in that dimension. I imagine stagings while walking down the street. I transfer the emotional architecture of characters onto my own spine. I rehearse dialogues in silence. The stage is not a location; it is a state of being.

The first seed

A performance I watched

Tell us about that first spark

Yes. I remember it not as a date, but as a sensation suspended in light.
I was eight years old, standing behind a curtain that smelled faintly of dust and old fabric. It was a Christmas performance. I had already danced on stages before; I knew choreography, rhythm, the discipline of repetition. But this was different. This time I was not merely moving – I was becoming.
There is a peculiar second before one steps onto the stage. The air tightens. The body becomes acutely aware of itself – heartbeat, breath, the weight of costume against the skin. And then there is silence. Not the absence of sound, but a charged stillness, as if the world itself is waiting to see who you will be.
In that moment, something shifted. I understood that stage was not about pretending. It was about revealing. I stepped forward, and the light erased the ordinary outline of my childhood self. I felt expanded – as though the role I carried was not placed upon me, but drawn out of me. The words I spoke were written by someone else, yet they resonated with an intimacy I did not yet have language for.
When the scene ended, the applause felt distant. What remained vivid was the transformation itself – the discovery that identity is fluid, that one can cross invisible borders and return changed. I walked offstage knowing that I had touched something essential. Not fame, not validation, but a doorway.
That was the moment theatre became important to me. It offered a space where intensity was allowed, where emotion was not excessive but necessary, where imagination did not need justification. I realized that the stage could hold what everyday life often could not.
Since then, I have never truly left that light.

Roots (people & experiences that shaped your path)

Who has been important in my theatre journey? Not only people – but forces.
Of course, there were teachers. The ones who corrected posture, diction, timing. The ones who demanded repetition when I thought something was already enough. They gave me structure – and structure, I later understood, is a form of care. They taught me that discipline is not the enemy of inspiration, but its skeleton.
There were partners. Dancers who breathed in sync with me. Actors whose eyes held mine in the fragile seconds before a scene unfolded. In those shared silences, I learned that theatre is never solitary, even when the role feels deeply personal. Creation is a crossing of energies.
There were places – rehearsal halls with cracked mirrors, stages too large for a child’s body, backstage corridors humming with nervous electricity. I grew inside those spaces. They became laboratories of becoming. Each floorboard carried traces of those who had stood there before me, and I felt myself joining an invisible lineage.

Then there were experiences that reshaped everything.
The war. The rupture of normality. The moment when art could no longer be decorative – it had to be necessary. Creating Freedom of Existence during the full-scale invasion transformed my understanding of theatre. It was no longer just expression – it was confrontation. It was survival. It was resistance against silence.
But perhaps the most important presence throughout my journey has been the audience – even when absent, even when unready. The imagined witness has always stood before me. I create not to be admired, but to be met. The longing for conscious reception has sharpened my purpose. It has made me demand more from myself.
And finally, the most constant figure has been the child I once was. The one sitting in a dark cinema, sensing that there was another layer beneath reality. I still create for him. I still ask whether the work holds enough magic to make him believe.
People guided me. Places shaped me. History tested me.
But the journey itself – the continuous need to transform inner turbulence into visible form – has been the truest teacher.

The trunk (what keeps you in theatre)

If theatre is the tree of my becoming, then the trunk is what holds when everything else trembles. What has kept me connected is not success, nor certainty, nor even constant opportunity. It is necessity.
There were moments when space was scarce – when acceptance felt conditional, when audiences were distracted, when creation had to fight for its right to exist. There were moments shaped by war, by instability, by the quiet exhaustion that follows intensity. In such periods, it would have been easier to reduce art to a memory, to something I once did.
But I never could. Theatre has remained because it answers something in me that nothing else does. It is the only place where my inner turbulence finds structure. Where contradiction is not a flaw, but material. Where vulnerability becomes strength the moment it is spoken aloud or embodied under light.
I stay because the stage is the only space where I feel entirely awake.
Even when rehearsals are repetitive, when progress is slow, when doubt whispers that perhaps another path would be simpler – there is always that moment. The moment before entering the light. The moment when breath aligns with intention. In that instant, I remember why I began. I remember the child who sensed another layer beneath reality. I remember that I chose not comfort, but depth.
The trunk is also discipline. It is showing up when inspiration is silent. It is training the body so that emotion has a vessel. It is rewriting, rethinking, refining. Passion may ignite the first spark, but commitment sustains the flame. Over time, I learned that devotion to craft is not romantic – it is steady, sometimes quiet, sometimes demanding. Yet it builds strength ring by ring, like wood thickening against the years.
Another force keeps me rooted: transformation. Theatre refuses stagnation. Each role unsettles identity. Each project asks new questions. Especially when I created during the invasion, I understood that art is not decoration – it is confrontation with existence itself. That realization anchored me deeper than any applause ever could.
And finally, I remain because I have not found another language that speaks so completely through me. I can write, dance, sing, draw – and I do. But theatre gathers all of these into one living act. It is convergence. It is synthesis. It is where body, voice, memory, and imagination meet in the same breath.
The trunk is what endures between seasons. It carries the scars of storms and the marks of growth. My connection to theatre is like that – shaped by challenge, strengthened by persistence, textured by experience.
I keep going because leaving would mean silencing a fundamental part of myself. And I have learned, over years of standing in light and shadow, that some parts of us are not meant to be quiet.

Branches (future / desire)

If theatre is my tree, then its branches are not decorations – they are directions.
I do not imagine theatre in my future as a profession alone, nor as a stage I occasionally step onto. I imagine it as an expanding organism – something that will continue to grow with me, through me, sometimes ahead of me. The branches stretch toward spaces I have not yet entered: new cities, new languages, new collaborations, new risks. I do not want theatre to remain familiar. I want it to challenge my form.
In the coming years, I hope theatre will give me depth before recognition. I want to refine my craft to the point where expression becomes precise – where emotion is not only intense, but articulated. I want to work with directors and performers who unsettle me, who question my instincts, who force me to dismantle habits and rebuild from a more conscious foundation. Growth, for me, must feel slightly uncomfortable; otherwise it is merely repetition.
I also hope theatre will give me space – literal and internal space. A space where creation is not constrained by fear or survival, where experimentation is possible without immediate justification. Especially after creating during wartime, I understand how necessary art can become. But I also long for the freedom to explore without urgency – to investigate silence, abstraction, intimacy.
Another branch extends toward dialogue. I want theatre to connect me with audiences who are not passive observers but participants in thought. I hope it can grant me encounters — moments when a performance becomes a shared pulse between stage and seats. I am not seeking applause as confirmation, but recognition as exchange.
And perhaps most importantly, I hope theatre continues to give me transformation. I never want to solidify into one identity. I want to inhabit multiplicity – to explore contradictions without resolving them too quickly. Theatre allows me to enter other lives without abandoning my own. It expands empathy. It sharpens awareness. It keeps me porous.
If the roots of my journey were instinct and the trunk was discipline, then the branches must be courage. Courage to fail publicly. Courage to create work that unsettles. Courage to evolve beyond the version of myself that feels safe.
In the next years, I do not ask theatre to make me someone else. I ask it to make me more – more precise, more resilient, more truthful. And if it continues to grow as I grow, then its branches will not only reach outward, but upward, into a space where art and existence are no longer separate territories, but one continuous horizon.

Are you currently involved in cultural activities?

Yes, regularly

If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be? Why?

If I were a tree, I would be a pine growing on the edge of a cliff.
Not the oldest tree in the forest, not the tallest in measured height – but the one that has learned to root itself in unstable ground. A tree that does not grow in sheltered valleys, but where the wind is constant and the soil is thin. A pine does not demand comfort; it negotiates with resistance. Its roots search patiently through stone, finding fractures where life can anchor itself. I recognize myself in that persistence.
The pine remains green in winter. That matters to me. There is something quiet and defiant in refusing to shed all color when the season turns harsh. I have always felt that art, for me, is precisely that – a form of remaining green in winter. Through performance, through movement, through voice, I hold onto vitality even when the surrounding world grows cold or uncertain.
There is also the scent of pine – sharp, clean, unmistakable. It lingers in the air long after you pass by. I hope my work carries something similar: not noise, not spectacle alone, but a trace. A resonance that stays with someone after the lights dim.
And yet, a pine is flexible. It bends. In storms, it yields without breaking. Theatre has taught me this quality – the ability to absorb impact, to transform pressure into motion rather than fracture. Each role, each performance, each historical rupture reshapes the trunk slightly, carving rings into the core. Growth is not always visible from the outside, but it accumulates within.
Finally, a tree stands between worlds. Its roots descend into darkness; its crown reaches toward light. That duality feels essential to me. My work has always lived in that tension – exploring struggle, vulnerability, confrontation, but reaching toward meaning, toward something luminous. Like a tree, I draw nourishment from what is hidden, and I offer what I can upward.
So yes – a pine on a cliff. Not because it is romantic, but because it survives in exposure. Because it transforms wind into strength. Because even when alone against the horizon, it continues to grow.

Contact

Instagram: @the.ymak