Yara Arts Group to present evening of poetry (05/11/97)

Yara Arts Group to present evening of poetry

NEW YORK - The Yara Arts Group will present "Hot House," a bilingual evening of Ukrainian poetry on Friday, May 16, 8 p.m. at the Ukrainian Institute of America, 2 E. 79th Street. As part of the evening, this year's Poetry Award from the Global Commitment Foundation will be presented to a Ukrainian poet.

Yara's actors will perform the poetry in what critics have called "the trademark Yara method of interweaving original and translation. The latter conveys the frame of meaning and the former, the original rhythm and ancient emotion." The English translations were created especially for Yara's performances by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps. Some of the poems served as lyrics for songs written by composer Genji Ito and will be sung during the evening.

Yara Arts Group, a resident company at La MaMa Experimental Theatre in New York, sets in motion a dialogue between languages and cultures on stage. "Yara is like nothing else in the Ukrainian diaspora," as The Ukrainian Weekly once wrote. "Its mixture of East Village hipness and Ukrainian poetry blends the two cultures Ukrainian Americans grew up with."

Yara has recently returned from Ukraine where it opened the Experimental Theater Festival in Kyiv with its production of "Virtual Souls." Since its founding in 1990, Yara has produced six original theater pieces, including: "A Light from the East," (1990-1991) about Les Kurbas and his struggle to create a modern Ukrainian theater in 1920; "Explosions" (1992), which commemorated Chornobyl and included poetry awarded the Agni Translation Prize; "Blind Sight" (1993), about the blind poet Vasyl Yeroshenko who traveled to Japan in 1914, which the Village Voice called "delicate and ethereal in the extreme, yet somehow as tough as steel, hard as nails..." and "Yara's Forest Song" (1994), based on Lesia Ukrainka's classic "Lisova Pisnia", called "a dazzling parable for our time" by N.Y. Casting "Waterfall/Reflections" (1995), which was created by Yara with Nina Matvienko, called a "theatrical enchantment" by the New York Times.

Translators Ms. Tkacz and Ms. Phipps have received the Agni Translation Prize, the National Theater Translation Fund Award and grants from the New York State Council on the Arts for their work with Ukrainian poetry. Their translations have been published in American literary magazines and several recent anthologies.

For more information, call the Yara Arts Group at (212) 475-6474.

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