Yara Arts Group presents "Swan" at La Mama Theater (06/15/03)

Yara Arts Group presents "Swan" at La Mama Theater

NEW YORK - "Swan," the newest work by Yara Arts Group is a music-theater piece based on an eponymous poem by prominent Ukrainian poet Oleh Lysheha. The poem is contained in the book "Selected Poems of Oleh Lysheha" (Harvard University, 1999), translated by the author and James Brasfield, which won the PEN Translation Prize last year.

Mr. Lysheha has been called a metaphysician of the natural world. His poetic sensibility is akin to that of Rilke, Montale and Simic. American author/critic James Carroll has written that Mr. Lysheha's poetry "offers American readers in particular not just a new voice, but, even in translation, a new language, a new way of seeing." Yara's show, performed in English, will once again reflect Yara's commitment to cross-cultural understanding by presenting an original piece created by multicultural artists that is based on masterpieces of art, literature and music from a culture little-known in the West.

The poem upon which the piece is based may be read online at: http://www.brama.com/yara/lys-swan.html.

"Swan" is directed by Virlana Tkacz, with composer/cellist Paul Brantley and blues vocalist Meredith Wright. Set, lights and costumes are by Mr. Ueno, and video by Andrea Odezynska. The cast includes Yara artists Andrew Colteaux and Soomi Kim.

Director Tkacz, head of the Yara Arts group, recently was named one of the finalists for the Alan Schneider Directing Award by Theater Communication Group. Mr. Brantley has had his music published by Oxford University Press and performs with Bela Fleck and the Flecktones. Ms. Wright has appeared in Yara productions since 1997, most recently creating original vocals for "Howling."

Mr. Lysheha was born in the Carpathian region of Ukraine in 1949 and studied English at the University of Lviv, where he began translating the poems of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Sylvia Plath and William Carlos Williams into Ukrainian. He called his own early poems "songs" and numbered them instead of assigning titles.

Expelled from school during the purges in 1972 for contributing to the literary journal Skrynia (Chest), he was drafted and sent to Siberia to serve his term in the army in the Buryat Republic. This initiated his interest in Asian philosophy, arts and culture which would eventually become a major influence on his work.

Returning to Ukraine, Mr. Lysheha settled in Kyiv and worked on his poetry while holding menial jobs. He managed to totally isolate himself from the official literary world and his first collection of poetry, "The Great Bridge" (1989) was truly unique. Shortly afterwards he wrote his first play, "Brother Li Po, Friend Tu Fu," about the great eighth century Chinese poets. The Budmo Theater produced the play in Kyiv and toured it in Germany in 1993.

Paradoxically, Mr. Lysheha is more popular now in North America than in Ukraine, where his poetry is only now being published and his poetic form is finally appreciated. His second book "To Snow and Fire," which includes the poem "Swan," was published only this winter in Ukraine.

The Harvard University Press writes: "Oleh Lysheha is considered the 'poet's poet' of contemporary Ukraine. A dissident and iconoclast, he was forbidden to publish in the Soviet Union from 1972 to 1988. Since then his reputation has grown to legendary proportions. His work is informed by transcendentalism and Zen-like introspection with meditations on the essence of the human experience and man's place in nature."

The translations of Mr. Lysheha's poetry used in the production are by Ms. Tkacz and Ms. Phipps, who received several New York State Council on the Arts Translation Awards and the National Theater Translation Prize for their work with Ukrainian verse. Most recently they won the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry Award for their translations with Sayan Zhambalov of Buryat shaman chants.

Founded in 1990, Yara Arts Group, a resident company of La MaMa, creates original pieces that explore timely issues rooted in the East through the diverse cultural perspectives of the group's members. Yara artists are of Asian, African, Eastern and Western European ethnic origin. They bring together poetry, song, historical materials and scientific texts, primarily from the East, to form what one critic described as "extended meditation on an idea."

The company has created six pieces based on materials from Eastern Europe including: "A Light from the East," "Blind Sight," "Yara's Forest Song" and "Waterfall/Reflections." The New York Times (D.J.R. Bruckner) called this piece, developed with folk singer Nina Matvienko, "a theatrical enchantment given cohesion by choreographed movement and by music on a prodigal scale." Since 1996 Yara has created five more theater pieces with Buryat artists from Siberia.

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