FOCUS ON THE ARTS: Yara Arts Group to present "Wayward Wind" (05/12/96)

FOCUS ON THE ARTS: Yara Arts Group to present "Wayward Wind"

The Yara Arts Group, a resident company at the La Mama Experimental Theater in New York City, has been creating theater pieces based on Ukrainian material since 1990. Currently the group is working on "Wayward Wind," which is being presented in workshop productions Thursday-Sunday evenings at 7 p.m. on May 9-19. (For tickets call the La Mama Box Office, 74 E. Fourth St., between Second and Third avenues, 212-475-7710.)

The interview below with Virlana Tkacz, artistic director of the Yara Arts Group, was conducted on April 9 by Roman Baratiak, manager of films and lectures at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Q: Can you please tell us about the genesis of Yara's newest project "Wayward Wind?"

A: We wanted to do something with "wind," and I was also interested in working on a poem called "Swan," written in 1994 by Oleh Lysheha in Kyiv. Wanda Phipps and I translated the poem from the Ukrainian, and I worked on it last year at our theater workshops at Harvard Summer School. I became very interested in swan imagery.

In many ways this project is an extension of our last project "Waterfall /Reflections." In "Waterfall/Reflections" I was interested in the Neolithic era of Ukraine - an agricultural culture that was very water-based and female-oriented in its imagery. After that project was completed I started thinking about what was before then - the Paleolithic, which was a hunting culture that moved from place to place. In Mezin, Ukraine, this culture left us small carvings of birds and swans that are over 15,000 years old. Similar carvings from that period were found near Lake Baikal.

But how do you make a theater piece about ancient history? About the Paleolithic? What is it that we still have in common with this past? What have we forgotten that we shouldn't have because we've been so sedentary for so long? It's those questions that interest me.

Q: Have you always been interested in ancient history?

A: No. It's only recently that I've become fascinated by this period of history. When Yara was first formed in 1990 I was very interested in the 1920s and our first pieces reflected this. "A Light from the East," was about Les Kurbas, a director from the 1920s; "Explosions," our piece on Chornobyl, used a 1920s German drama; and "Blind Sight," about Vasyl Yeroshenko, the blind poet who traveled to Japan, was also from that time. I felt I understood something essential about that era and that it spoke to me very clearly. "Yara's Forest Song," the Lesia Ukrainka piece we did was also from near that general era - the early part of this century. But what I found particularly interesting in Ukrainka's drama were the mythic elements.

In my last pieces I've attempted to combine modern elements such as poetry with mythic sources. "Yara's Forest Song" combined modern American poetry by Mary Oliver, Van Morrison and David Wagoner with American Indian poetry and Ukrainian folklore. We did this, not to create contrast, but to find the connections between them. The point of my productions is to find a connection between us today and a past. My life has been very much about trying to understand my own connection to a past - to my Ukrainian background.

Q: Are there difficulties inherent in combining sources from the past and the present?

A: It's not difficult to combine them but it is difficult to make some people understand why they should be combined.

Q: Is it obvious to your actors?

A: Sometimes it is - and that's when it's good.

Q: I understand the new piece "Wayward Wind" will include Buryat and Mongolian folklore and music? When did you first encounter them?

A: A friend of mine had some of the music on tape, plus I had heard some recordings of Mongolian music on various compact discs. Yara is presently working with Vladilen Pantaev, the foremost composer of Buryat music. He'll be collaborating with our resident composer Genji Ito to create the music for "Wayward Wind." I also read a large number of Buryat and Mongolian folk tales. I was very interested in the bird imagery. Our last piece ended with women flying off as birds, so this continuation intrigued me.

The Buryat swan myth forms a natural frame for Lysheha's poem, "Swan." It's interesting to me that the core of our new piece is a contemporary Ukrainian poem, but the folkloric material which supports it is from Asia. Vladilen Pantaev recently told me that in Buryat the word for "swan" literally means "person bird."

Q: How do you go about researching your projects?

A: I spend many hours at the major research libraries in New York City. For this project a great deal of the information we found on the Internet and that's why the Internet is included in our new project. It's interesting finding out about the oldest things via the latest technology and to think about how the past and the present interconnect. I had posted a notice to a news group on the Internet asking for information on Mongolian music and dance and received a number of responses, including one from Beverly Seavey who had a six-hour videotape of some Mongolian and Buryat dances.

Q: Did you receive any responses from people overseas?

A: Oh yes. In fact one of the people, Carole Pegg, an expert on Mongolian music who lives in England, is coming to the United States in about two weeks to lecture at Harvard University and then will come to New York City to meet with me. Currently, I've had a great deal of correspondence with colleagues in Ukraine on the topic of swans and Paleolithic and Neolithic archaeological finds in Ukraine. I recently received an e-mail from Mary Mycio, an American journalist working in Kyiv, about her interviews with Marija Gimbutas, the author of "The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe," whose ideas inspired our last piece. The Internet provides access to ideas and resources which would otherwise be unavailable to me.

Q: How do you develop your pieces?

A: Most of our pieces are first developed in a workshop at La Mama and then we travel abroad to Ukraine and include actors who speak Ukrainian. We incorporate them, their world view and their opinions into the piece. The piece then becomes the dialogue of the two cultures looking at one thing, and is enhanced by the fact that the American actors are already such a multicultural group. The two groups of actors working together create a naturally bilingual piece. Although the actors don't speak the same language, a shared understanding and trust is created at a higher conceptual level.

The actors work together for several weeks and then we present the piece abroad. For example, "Blind Sight" was rehearsed in Kharkiv and first performed at the Berezil International Theater Festival; "Yara's Forest Song" was developed in Lviv; and "Waterfall/Reflections" was developed in Kyiv. When we return to the U.S. we refine the piece to compensate for the cultural differences in the audience. For example, Ukrainian audiences like the ideas to be more elaborated, whereas American audiences are looking for a quicker and sharper pace.

Will you be following the same steps with your new production?

Yes. The first step in the performance will be a workshop production next month at the First Street Workshop Space La Mama in New York City from May 9 through May 19. During the summer we'll incorporate the new ideas from abroad and present a full production of "Wayward Wind" here in New York in late January 1997.

Q: Can you speak a bit about your work translating Ukrainian material?

A: The challenge is how to take the wealth of wonderful Ukrainian material and make it accessible to my American friends and other people who can't read Ukrainian. I've noticed that Ukrainian-speaking people my age or younger can also benefit from an English translation of a Ukrainian poem. They then have a better understanding of the subtleties of the original work. We've put a lot of energy into our poetry events to reach the younger Ukrainian American community because we feel they should be aware of the very vibrant contemporary Ukrainian culture to which they, because of language problems, have very little access.

Translation is the key to all our pieces. I'm very interested in translating poetry that can speak to a modern audience. It's the voice I heard. I imagine the poem - be it Oleh Lysheha's, Pavlo Tychyna's or Oksana Zabuzhko's - spoken by my actors who are contemporary young Americans. Spoken poetry has a powerful tradition in Ukraine. Our poetic literature is mostly oral. There's thousands of years of this work.

Q: How is your company received when it performs in Ukraine?

A: We're received very well in the press and are usually presented as an American theater group working with Ukrainian material. However, it's interesting that this past year we were reviewed as part of the theater season in Kyiv. In one of the big write-ups, theater critic Nelli Kornienko wrote about "Waterfall/Reflections" as one of three interesting new shows engaged in a unique search for utopia. The other shows were directed by Valery Bilchenko and Andriy Zholdak. Good company! So I guess we're considered an integral part of the culture there now.

Q: What is the role of multiculturalism in your work?

A: Our concept of a world theater really comes from Ellen Stewart, the founder of La Mama. She believes that you need to communicate with the whole world and not to just your own little in-group. The people who initially formed Yara - Wanda Phipps, Watoku Ueno and I - embraced this idea.

Q: What has been the impact on Yara from the fiscal cutbacks at federal and state agencies such as the New York State Council on the Arts?

A: Smaller groups such as ours are being pushed to the edge and unless there is support coming from the community it will be difficult for these organizations to survive. We have to spend a great deal of our time trying to obtain funding. The funding cuts are extremely devastating to Ukrainian American organizations, and I don't think people in our community realize that.

I think Ukrainian American culture is in crisis today. We don't notice because there has been an influx of performing groups from Ukraine, who tour here. At the same time the whole local structure is disappearing. Who's going to teach the Ukrainian dance groups? Who's going to work with the young kids on theater shows? Who's doing art in the schools now? Can Ukrainian American culture survive into the future?

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