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The company in conversation
Five days before opening night, four members of Pereberia sat down with SBS Ukrainian to talk about why they made Trypillian Tarot - and why a company of people who arrived here because of a war chose to stage something that is not, in the end, about the war.
SBS Ukrainian, 9 July 2026
Listen to the full interview at SBSPresenter Bogdan Rudnytskyi · in Ukrainian · 19 min 47 secPereberia (Переберія) is a Ukrainian-Australian experimental theatre company founded in Melbourne by Iryna Karanets. Most of the people who made Trypillian Tarot arrived in Australia because of the war. Karanets describes wanting to find like-minded people to build something with, having been in the country only four years herself.
The project came first and the company followed. Karanets wrote it and entered it into La Mama’s Explorations programme, which supports the work of independent artists; it was selected, and that selection brought a La Mama team, technical support, a stage manager and the subsidy that kept tickets at $20.
Roman Korchev explains that the Trypillian material is an artistic language rather than a history lesson - the company invented its story on the foundation of what survives, and used the culture’s symbols to talk about memory, loss, lineage and migration. Real documentary footage from Ukraine, supplied by filmmaker Serhii Sotnichenko, sits inside that frame: about two minutes of it.
The clearest thing the company says about its own show is what it is not. Alina Rybalchenko puts it plainly: this is not so much about the war in Ukraine as about a Ukrainian migrant’s search in Australia - the search for themselves, and for a home in a new place.
Iryna Malashkova, who is from Kherson, describes migration as a different front line - one you still have to survive, with children, starting from zero. She talks about being ambushed in Melbourne by the sound of helicopters and thrown back in time, and about the show being built from the company’s shared reflections on that experience.
Rybalchenko explains the choice to stage the work in English: the company speaks Ukrainian among themselves, but the production reaches past the diaspora deliberately, to talk to an Australian audience rather than only to compatriots. Korchev adds that he wants people here to know Ukrainians not only through catastrophe, but as active and talented people already living alongside them.
In their words
Short excerpts, with the original Ukrainian. Timings refer to the SBS recording.
“We want to introduce Australians to Ukraine through art.”
«Ми хочемо знайомити австралійців з Україною через мистецтво.»
“Instead of sitting and crying, we decided to pour our emotions into art.”
«Замість того, щоб сидіти і плакати, ми вирішили наші емоції вкинути у мистецтво.»
“The war does not end for Ukrainians at the moment they cross the border.”
«Війна для українців не закінчується в моменті, коли вони перетинають кордон.»
“Because we are Melburnians too. We live in this country too.”
«Бо ми теж мельбурнці, ми теж живемо в цій країні.»
Notes for journalists
The interview is in Ukrainian and SBS did not publish a transcript. We hold a working transcription and English translation for our own records. The recording is SBS’s copyright, so we don’t republish it here - please link to the SBS episode page. If you’re writing about the production and need help with a passage, get in touch.
Images, credits and production details are in the media kit.