Yara to celebrate book's launch (11/16/97)

Yara to celebrate book's launch

NEW YORK - Yara Arts Group invites the public to an evening of wine, poetry and music to celebrate the publication of "Ten Years of Poetry from Yara Theatre Workshops at Harvard," a hand-made volume of contemporary Ukrainian poetry in award-winning translations by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps.

The event, which commemorates 10 years of Yara's Theatre Workshops at the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Studies Program, will take place on Sunday November 23, at 7 p.m. at the Ukrainian Institute of America, 2 E. 79th St. The evening will feature bilingual poetry performances, music and a special sale of the book. Participants will include Yara actors, alumni from the theater workshops and musician Julian Kytasty on bandura.

The Yara Theatre Workshops at Harvard, begun by Virlana Tkacz in 1988, were the springboard for creating the Yara Arts Group, now a resident theater company with the La MaMa Experimental Theater in New York. Yara's trademark multilingual performances based on Ukrainian literature are well-known to the Ukrainian American community.

The Yara Arts Group has staged original theater productions annually at La MaMa since its debut in 1990, last winter presenting "Virtual Souls" at the La MaMa Annex.

It was the 1989 piece presented at Harvard, "Les Kurbas: Fragments in Performance," that featured scenes from three Kurbas productions, including Shevchenko's "The Sky's Unwashed," that provided the material and impetus to produce Yara's first performance at La MaMa "A Light From the East" in 1990.

The summer studies program at Harvard, attended by Ukrainians from all over the world and non-Ukrainians from all walks of life, offer a unique cultural haven for the Yara theater workshop. They encourage students to be spontaneous and original in their interpretations of Ukrainian poetry, and it is the blending of interpretations, experiences and ideas that have elicited by a positive response from those students. Julian Zahalak, a graduate student at the University of Chicago enthused, "I was introduced to aspects of Ukrainian culture I didn't know existed."

Over the last 10 years, with the help of designer Watoku Ueno and dramaturg/translator Wanda Phipps, Virlana Tkacz has brought the poetry of various Ukrainian authors and epochs to the students at Harvard beginning with the summer of 1988-1989 which focused on the works of Les Kurbas and also featured the poetry of Taras Shevchenko and Mykola Kulish, to this past summer, during which students performed "Seven Veils," the works of seven contemporary Ukrainian poets: Mariana Sawka, Mykola Vorobiov, Anka Sereda, Viktor Neborak, Liudmyla Taran, Mykola Miroshnychenko and Oksana Zabuzhko.

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