Cast

Rusty Yunusoff

Professionally, I’m a storyboard artist, illustrator, animator, and cartoonist—but more than anything, I think of myself as a storyteller.

Over the years, I’ve worked on a wide range of animation and television projects in Hollywood, including Golan the Insatiable for FOX and The Awesomes on Hulu. My animated short films have also traveled to festivals around the world, from Washington, D.C.—where one received Best Animated Short—to Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Munich, and Brussels.

What has always interested me most is the moment when an idea becomes a story: when words begin to move, images begin to speak, and characters suddenly feel alive.

That is exactly what I enjoy about working with RAMKA.

Together with the rest of our puppet theater team, I get to take something that begins on the page and help transform it into something visual, physical, and alive on stage.

For me, RAMKA is another form of storytelling—just with different tools.

And this time, some of the characters happen to have strings, feathers, papier-mâché, and a life of their own.

Irina Abramovich

I spent more than thirty years working as an architect in the United States, and today I teach architecture at a Russian school.

I love art in all its forms, but theater has always held a special place in my heart.

For a long time, I felt that our corner of Southern California was missing a little of theater’s magic. And then an idea appeared: why not create a theater of our own? An amateur theater, perhaps—but a puppet theater for adults, with life-size puppets that we would design and build ourselves.

From the beginning, I knew I didn’t want to do it alone. I wanted to find people who were just as obsessed with the idea as I was—people willing to imagine it, build it, and bring it to life.

And somehow, I found them.

There are eight of us now. This shared idea brought us together, took hold of us, and still refuses to let go.

So we imagine. We build. We experiment. We rehearse. We keep going.

And really, what could be better than finding a group of people who believe in the same slightly impossible dream?I love them all.

Sergei Bedov

I traveled a great deal from an early age, and that sparked a lasting curiosity about how things work—people, cultures, spaces, and the world we create around us. I also grew up in a creative family, so art and the stage were always somewhere nearby.

That desire to understand how things are built eventually became my profession. I’m an engineer, and I enjoy exploring new technologies and the possibilities they open for people.

Over time, that same curiosity turned inward. It led me to the Inner Engineering program, which became the beginning of my interest in yoga and a habit I now value deeply: observing what is happening within me.

What draws me to this performance is the opportunity not only to live through a role, but also to observe it—to be inside the experience while noticing how it unfolds.

For me, theater becomes another form of exploration, and perhaps another way of searching for truth.

My family—my wife and our two daughters—are my deepest teachers. With them, I learn every day about love, patience, and presence.

And I deeply value the time we are lucky enough to share.

Natalia Yargomskaya

I’m Natalia—a psychologist, a wife, and a mom of two wonderful teenagers.

I have always been drawn to different forms of art: film, drawing, singing, dancing, and, of course, theater. What fascinates me most is the world of images and metaphors—the way they can quietly change how we see ourselves, other people, and the world around us.

Theater has a special ability to hold many layers at once. A gesture, a pause, an image, a line of text can sometimes say more than words alone. I love bringing those layers to the stage and turning something familiar about our lives into something we can suddenly see differently.

I have already been an actress in adult theater and a director in children’s theater. Now I’ve found myself in a new and wonderfully unexpected place: a puppet theater for adults.

There is something magical about giving life to a puppet—about watching an object begin to breathe, feel, and speak.

For me, RAMKA is a place to explore, experiment, and create meaning together.

And, just as importantly, we’re having a really good time doing it.

Polina Bondarchuk

I’m an art teacher, and for most of my professional life I have worked with children. I also have my own art studio, and my love of theater, costumes, and stage design has been with me since childhood.

I grew up in a creative family, studied art history through the Hermitage Museum program, attended art school, and spent twenty years supporting my own children in their theater adventures. Somewhere along the way, I also found myself on stage.

As an actress, I have played all kinds of characters: princesses, witches, and animals. I remember being a rooster, a drake, and even a pike. In RAMKA, I play a Bird.

It is my first role in which I do not become the character entirely myself. Instead, I work with a puppet and discover what it means to give movement, personality, and life to something created by human hands.

Our Bird was made by the wonderful artists Irina Abramovich and Maria Peregudova. For this production, I also created a papier-mâché Golden Fish.

RAMKA brings together so many things I love: visual art, theater, handmade objects, imagination—and that strange little moment when an object suddenly begins to feel alive.

Maria Vitess

If someone had told me a year ago that I would become part of a puppet theater company, I would have been very surprised. My family, in fact, still is.

I teach mathematics and love photography as a space for exploring thoughts and emotions. I love literature for the conversations it opens—with ourselves and with the world. In general, I’m drawn to anything that makes us think, question, and change.

Growing up in St. Petersburg, theater was always part of my life. Some performances could turn me inside out in two hours; others left me feeling almost weightless. One of my brightest memories is The Magic Feather at the Demmeni Marionette Theater—a feeling I have carried with me for decades.

This summer, while rereading a favorite novel, I suddenly began imagining it as a puppet show. Then I opened Facebook and saw Irina’s invitation to “play with puppets—but for grown-ups.”

Serendipity? I think so.

At RAMKA, I sew puppets, take photographs, work with the script, and will even step onto the stage myself—although I can only say that last part in a whisper.

I hope we create something truly alive—something the audience can enter with us and leave just a little changed.

Maybe even a little happier.

Natalia Tulkoff

My profession has very little to do with theater—which has never stopped theater from periodically bursting into my life.

My first serious production happened in second grade. A friend and I wrote and staged a play for two: desks became the stage, chalk drawings became scenery, pajamas became costumes. We had a premiere, an audience, and, as far as I choose to remember, thunderous applause.

At university, I joined a student theater and spent two wonderfully chaotic years performing before life filled up with families, children, work, exams, and all sorts of non-theatrical things.

After moving to a new country, theater disappeared from my life for a while. Later it returned through my son’s school.

Then, in 2023, life dropped me into one of its deeper potholes. By the end of 2025, I finally felt myself coming back—and almost without slowing down, I jumped into RAMKA. I’m glad I did. RAMKA is a living workshop where a performance grows from nothing. Our puppets increasingly feel like reflections of ourselves.

A frame separates, focuses, refracts, protects. At our performance, we will show you what we have gathered inside ours. What you carry away from it will be entirely your own.

Anna Shakirova

Theater has a funny habit of finding its way into my life. I step into it, wander away, and then somehow find myself back again.

I grew up surrounded by KSP, the Soviet tradition of amateur song clubs. People would disappear into the woods for a weekend with guitars, songs, poetry, jokes, and long conversations about everything imaginable.

So I grew up believing that four-part harmony around a campfire was perfectly normal—and that almost any gathering could use a creative idea or two.

Ten years ago, my husband, our son, and I moved to the United States. I love the life we built here, but for a long time I missed that particular creative spark.

Then I found RAMKA. Or perhaps RAMKA found me. I hope our theater brings a little more imagination, color, and beautiful unpredictability to Southern California.