February 7, 2020

INTERVIEW: Virlana Tkacz on “GAZ,” Koliadnyky and Mars

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Yara Arts Group Archive

Virlana Tkacz

This season, Yara Arts Group celebrates its 30th anniversary. The season boasts a number of projects – from grand international productions to small intimate events. Below, Virlana Tkacz, artistic director of Yara, offers her reflections on this milestone.

 

Virlana, could you tell me about the history of Yara.

First of all, Yara Arts Group is not just me, it is really a group of people – like-minded artists who have worked in many functions in all our shows and events, and each of them brought very special contributions that helped create our art over the years. We started Yara Arts Group in 1990 to create a new theater piece with Ukrainian poetry, and it eventually became a piece about Les Kurbas and our own dreams. We called it “A Light from the East:  A Docu-Dream.” It was a documentary about the dream of young people in theater. At first, I was the only Ukrainian on the project and all the actors were English-speaking, so we had to translate all the material. And that’s how I first became involved in translation.

So what has Yara done since?

In 30 years, we have done 35 plays – original theater productions, and really thousands of events at this point. I have a list of the events, and it is about 60 pages long. It’s really thousands of events all over the world – lectures, and concerts, and films, some very small events, like intimate poetry readings, to gigantic art exhibits. For instance, “Kurbas: New Worlds,” the exhibit we did last year at Mystetskyi Arsenal in Kyiv, was so large you could barely see the other side of the space.  I was a co-curator on the exhibition with Tanya Rudenko and Waldemart Kluzko, but over the six weeks of the exhibition we also arranged over 30 special events dedicated to Kurbas. That is why the exhibition drew over 20,000 people.

Yara’s mission states that you are a group of artists who come together to create original work on Eastern themes. Could you please elaborate?

I am interested in the cultures of the East, and especially of course Ukrainian, which I believe is very central to the American cultural scene and also to the American experimental scene that I am a part of.

Ukrainian culture in America?

I believe culture is a dialogue, and you have to participate, you have to speak back to the artifacts of culture. So, if you translate Tychyna [a famous Ukrainian poet], if you do a play about Tychyna, reprint or make a painting about Tychyna – you are participating in Ukrainian culture, because you are creating dialogue on the theme. And therefore, it is my goal to make that dialogue very rich and full with many artists participating, not only people of Ukrainian heritage, but also of many other heritages, both from vary famous people like André De Shields who is a Tony award winner to the kids in a school in Brooklyn.

How do you manage to get people who have nothing to do with Ukraine or its culture interested in it?

Because Ukrainian culture is interesting! You just have to present it in a way that people can relate to it. You know, we are trying to make our events welcoming to people of other heritages. So, first of all, our events are bilingual or multilingual, so many different people can take part in it. Yara has Asian actors and African American actors in our pieces. Then the material becomes more universal, because it speaks to many different kinds of people. And then you realize just how brilliant some parts of Ukrainian culture are. Both very traditional like the Koliadnyky – I have yet to meet somebody who has not been totally swept off their feet by these great folk artists. Or Nina Matviyenko’s voice – both are very traditional and very modern. I mean, I think that everyone who attended the PEN Festival session that I did with Serhiy Zhadan was swept away by him as a poet! And it is my great joy that I could say – Wanda Phipps and I translated Zhadan’s poetry into English and helped people here enter his world.

I see that the big show for this year is “Opera GAZ.” Why did you decide to take on this idea? And what is “GAZ”?

“GAZ” points to the very roots of Yara Arts Group, because our very first show, “Light From the East,” was about Kurbas. We did this play here in New York in 1990, and in 1991 we did our first cultural exchange by going to Kyiv and doing the play with Ukrainians in Kyiv and our company, so the cast was half Ukrainian and half American. People were speaking in both languages, and the show was about that cultural exchange itself. And now we are doing the first play Kurbas’s actors performed at the Berezil Artistic Association in Kyiv. Our current project “Opera GAZ” was inspired by Kurbas’s first big hit at the Berezil in 1923. And here we are, after all these years, returning to the same topic – Kurbas and his first great show at Berezil.

Tell me how and when this project started.

Well, it was exactly one year ago, in November 2018. The “Kurbas: New Worlds” exhibit was at the Mystetskyi Arsenal. I was doing a guided tour, and two composers came. We started talking, and I started telling them about how Kurbas used movement to create an explosion on stage. He used very avant-garde music along with the movement. I asked the composers Roman Grygoriv and Illia Razumeyko if they would help me find the original music, but they said – oh, we can write our own. And I am so glad they did! Because it became a whole different second project, not just a research project, but an original theater piece that we did not expect to do. Two days later, we were in the middle of it. It is an opera with six singers, who perform as a chorus of workers who are working at a gas factory, and it’s a hundred years in the future – but a future as imagined in the 1920s. They thought that gas was going to drive the world, not electricity. They imagined that we’d all be talking on gas phones and using gas computers. Our show has a futuristic look, but it is a 1920s futurism [laughs]. It is about an explosion at a gas factory, but it’s not an explosion the way it is in Kurbas – it is an explosion inside the workers. Our libretto includes poetry by my favorite poet Pavlo Tychyna, both his most beautiful lyric poem and his most grotesque one, which we use when people turn into robots.

Do you still do scholarly research on Kurbas?

A wonderful thing happened recently, that also brought all of this together. Ten years ago, Irena Makarek and I put together “Modernism in Kyiv,” a volume on what was happening in the arts, history and culture in Kyiv. It was going to be a background to writing our Kurbas book. What an amazing place Kyiv was in 1910-1920s! It was the time when the avant-guard arose in Kyiv. So we co-edited this book of 20 essays written by both Ukrainian and Western scholars, more than 300 photos and reproductions. The University of Toronto published it, and now it has been reviewed in Harvard Ukrainian Studies Journal by Uilleam Blacker: “Irena Makaryk and Virlana Tkacz’s volume on the dynamic cultural life of Kyiv in the age of modernism represents a momentous achievement in English-language scholarship on Ukrainian culture.”

It seems like everything you touch eventually revolves around Kurbas.

Yes! And this I realized only recently – even our events with the Hutsuls are also related to Kurbas. Did you know that his first job was working at the Hutsul theater that Hnat Khotkevych started? And it was in a village right next to Kryvorivnia. There is a picture of him visiting with one of my grand uncles, who ran a school in Zhabye, Verkhovyna.

Incredible!

It is really is. My grandfather Kost’ Kysylewskyj always told us kids he knew Kurbas. And we thought – yeah, yeah, yeah [laughs]. Then, two years ago when I was putting the first part of the Kurbas exhibit at the Theater Museum in Kyiv we had to take a part of the old Kurbas exhibit downstairs. One case had all his photos and papers from his life in Vienna. It was incredibly heavy. I was trying to hold my end up, but had to sit down, because my heart is beating so hard… I am trying to catch my breath, and I look at this part near the floor that is right near my face. I am looking and it and thinking – Kurbas read a poem at a Shevchenko evening in Vienna in 1910 – I knew that! And there is a program – oh my God! I had never really looked at it. So I thought – oh, I wonder what poem he read. At the very bottom it said “Caucasus” (Kavkaz), a terrific poem.  And then I look a little further up – maybe he read another one, I think, and there was another poem “Hamaliya,” but the person who read it was not Kurbas – it was my grandfather!  I almost thought I made the whole thing up, because it seemed so unlikely [laughs]. I had to look again and again – Kost’ Kysylewskyj.

Your grandfather was in Vienna?

Yes, he was at the University of Vienna before World War I and knew Kurbas. He loved to read poetry, and he read us poetry by Pavlo Tychyna instead of fairy tales. Think of all the questions I could have asked! But, you only can ask the questions you see at the moment, and at that moment I wasn’t looking!

Besides GAZ, are you currently working on any other projects?

We are also doing two projects with Koliadnyky from Kryvorivnia. One is a traditional concert. Also, we always do collaborative projects with Koliadnyky at La MaMa. This year it is going to be “Koliada on Mars,” a very special look at the otherworldly possibilities of winter songs. I think it is going to be a really fun piece.

All these three projects mark the 30th anniversary of Yara – is that right?

Yes. And they also bring all the elements of Yara together neatly – both very traditional and very new avant-garde, and the history of the avant-garde, and how it all connects together. I guess we could have started with a 30th anniversary party, but this is so much more fun to do! We are still looking to fund all of this, and hopefully people give us a hand, donate and become friends of Yara.

A full list of Yara events can be found at www.yaraartsgroup.net/events.

Iryna Voloshyna is an assistant to Virlana Tkacz.

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