The SWEET DONUTS audio tour through the city of Khmelnytskyi was created by director and playwright Dmytro Levytskyi. He presented it for the first time at the TRANSLATORIUM Festival 2021. Dmytro developed an original route through the center of Khmelnytskyi and focused people’s attention both on buildings and numerous signs that are chaotically attached to the facades of buildings.
According to the director, the audio tour is one of the formats of theater art or the art of storytelling. He himself attended this kind of performance for the first time in Berlin in 2016, after which he began organizing his original audio tours in Kyiv.
Dmytro Levytskyi:
“TRANSLATORIUM is a festival of translation, so when I discussed the topic with the curators of the festival, we tried to understand how translation works and where the intersection between translation and urban space takes place. We have come to the point that in Khmelnytskyi, as in most cities, there are puns — Latin and Cyrillic signs, and the names of shops and beauty salons have different and chaotic styles. And this is a peculiar language that needs to be translated.”
SWEET DONUTS is the sign of one of the stalls in the center of Khmelnytskyi. It is in this place that Dmytro conceived the beginning of the audio tour. He laid the route through the central streets of the city: through the Jewish quarter and the synagogue that also houses a sports school, past the food market pavilions that are considered to be landmarks of modernism, and the first Soviet building in Khmelnytskyi, decorated with decorative tiles that were made and specially brought to Proskuriv (former name of Khmelnytskyi) from Kharkiv.
This kind of format is interesting because it is not a traditional tour where people surround the tour guide in a tight circle in order to hear the story better. Here, each participant has plenty of free space and, even in a group, can be alone with themselves and follow the voice in their headphones.
As Dmytro says, “this is an opportunity to visit places that are well known to people, but there are details and things that they usually do not pay attention to, and this is an offer to be here and now.”
In 2022, with the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, the TRANSLATORIUM team decided to conduct audio tours for the city residents and internally displaced people who found refuge in Khmelnytskyi.
Tania Rodionova:
“Today, it may seem to many people that culture is beside the point. However, we are sure that everyone can bring our victory closer by just doing their job. We know that Khmelnytskyi currently hosts thousands of people from other cities, that’s why the idea arose to introduce them to the space of the city and its residents. An audio tour is a good opportunity to start noticing details, to be a little quiet, alone with your thoughts, but at the same time not feeling lonely, because there is a whole group of the same passers-by, participants of a joint journey.”
Another goal was fundraising. Participants of the audio tours were able to donate any convenient amount. And all the collected funds were transferred to the needs of the unit of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, where the composer Timur Dzhafarov, the creator of the musical accompaniment to the audio tour, serves.
If you also want to walk the route, you can get an audio recording of the tour on your phone. To do this, please write to us at our address: translatoriumfest@gmail.com or via messenger on social networks.
Each donation starts from UAH 100. We will transfer all funds received to support the battalion where the composer of the audio tour serves.