DATELINE NEW YORK: Creative forces stirring on many fronts (04/02/00)

DATELINE NEW YORK: Creative forces stirring on many fronts

by Helen Smindak

I know that spring has arrived when the mailman delivers The Ukrainian Museum's Easter workshops calendar, announcing dates and times for its popular and well-established classes in decorating pysanky, baking traditional Easter breads and learning embroidery techniques and styles indigenous to various regions of Ukraine. That breath of spring is heightened when my e-mail imparts another springtime blessing - the Metropolitan Opera's announcement of its 2000-2001 season repertoire, revealing news that Paul Plishka, Sergei Koptchak, Maria Guleghina and Elena Zaremba will grace the Met stage in next season's productions.

Veteran bass Mr. Plishka, cited by Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times for the "commanding sound, great style and vitality" he displayed last month in the role of Dr. Bartolo in the "Barber of Seville," will return to the Met next fall in "Il Trovatore," "Manon" and "Turandot." Ms. Guleghina will appear in "Nabucco," Mr. Koptchak in "Don Giovanni" and Elena Zaremba in "Un Ballo in Maschera."

Easter-season doings

This year The Ukrainian Museum will not display its remarkable collection of pysanky from various regions of Ukraine, an exhibit that has always received a warm reception from public and press alike. Taking a different approach, it is showing the work of six well-known Ukrainian artisans from the United States and Canada: Yaroslava Bachynska of Montreal, Zenon Elyjiw of Rochester, N.Y., Luba Perchyshyn of Minneapolis, Tania Osadca of Parma, Ohio, Ihor Slabitsky of Rhode Island and Sophia Zielyk of New York. Opening on April 2 and running through the end of June, the display carries some 25 to 30 examples of each decorator's creativity along with photos of the six artisans.

Demonstrations of pysanka-decorating, conducted by batik-method experts Emily Robbins and Yaryna Ferencevych, are scheduled for April 22. For adults and children who wish to create their own pysanky, decorating workshops have been scheduled for April 8, 9, 15 and 16. Continuous showings of Slavko Nowytski's beautiful film "Pysanka" will run during museum hours Wednesday through Sunday, 1 to 5 p.m.

Museum publicity rep Marta Baczynsky says that arrangements have been made once again for "a large contingent" of art students from the Parsons School of Design to attend decorating workshops at the museum this month. She also noted that the eight-week embroidery class (April 8 to June 10), which has grown over the years, includes many women from outside the Ukrainian community who are fascinated by the intricacies of Ukrainian stitchery taught by Lubow Wolynetz and the historical and cultural lore she weaves in with her instructions.

The bread-baking class scheduled for April 15 also benefits from Ms. Wolynetz's baking expertise and knowledge of Ukrainian Easter traditions. The three-session course in making gerdany, the colorful bead-strung necklaces worn with folk costumes in many regions of Ukraine, will be conducted by Ms. Ferencevych. For further information, call the museum at (212) 228-0110.

A promising career

Mezzo-soprano Kalyna Cholhan-Boychuk, who created a singular impression when she appeared as Carmen in the Castillo Theater's 1995 production of "Carmen's Community," a tale of two contrasting Carmens - one the tough girl Carmencita who lives behind Lincoln Center, the other the title character of the opera who lives only on stage at the Met - has continued to advance her professional career.

Appearing with the New York-based Touring Concert Opera Company in the company's production of Bizet's "Carmen," Ms. Cholhan-Boychuk has been performing the role of Mercedes (one of Carmen's gypsy companions). She will move up to the title role in the fall.

Working with such companies as the Sarasota Opera, Aspen Opera Theater Center, Empire State Opera and Cape Cod's College Light Opera Company, Ms. Cholhan-Boychuk has performed leading roles in "Le Nozze di Figaro," "Cosi Fan Tutte," "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "Il Barbiere di Siviglia." She has also appeared with New York's Gilbert and Sullivan Players.

On the concert stage, the young mezzo-soprano has been showcased as a soloist in Bach's "Christmas Oratorio" and Cantata No. 147, Britten's "Rejoice in the Lamb" and the Aspen Music Festival premier of a work titled "In the Sparkling Whorls." She participated as an apprentice artist with Sarasota Opera and as a resident artist with the Natchez Opera Festival.

Ms. Cholhan-Boychuk has been proud to participate in several concerts for the Ukrainian community in New York and Philadelphia, including a gala occasion held in honor of visiting President Leonid Kuchma.

A graduate of the Manhattan School of Music with a bachelor's degree in art history from Columbia University, Ms. Cholhan-Boychuk is a regional winner in the McAllister Awards Competition and a scholarship recipient of the Aspen School of Music in both the vocal concert program and the Aspen Opera Theater Center.

Artists from Lviv

The Ukrainian Institute of America, constantly bustling with musical events, pre-school music classes and theatrical presentations, has become a veritable art gallery for artists from Ukraine, undoubtedly reflecting the explosion of self-exploration in the realm of visual art in the first decade of Ukrainian independence.

Shown for a week in early March were recent paintings by Serhiy Hai and Ivan Tverdun of Lviv, both in their early 40s and graduates of the Lviv Academy of Fine Art, whose work was previously exhibited at the Alla Rogers Gallery in Washington. Following the New York exhibit, the artists returned to Washington so their work could be set up at the Embassy of Ukraine for a gala welcome to the newly appointed Ukrainian ambassador to the United States, Kostyantyn Gryshchenko.

Another week at the institute, which concluded on March 26, was devoted to an exhibit of watercolors, gouaches and oils by Lviv-born Orest Polisczuk, a longtime resident of Maryland who teaches sculpture at Montgomery College in Rockville, Md. As this "Dateline" column was being prepared, a fourth exhibit - that of Volodymyr Kovalchuk, a native of Volodymyr-Volynsk in Ukraine now living in Toronto, was about to open.

Mr. Hai, who has an impressive exhibition history (solo exhibitions in Lviv, Kyiv and Germany; group exhibitions in Ukraine, Poland, Germany, Switzerland and the United States, and several jury prizes), showed a series of highly attractive oils. His three-quarter to life-scale canvasses, focusing on the nude female figure, put one in mind of such great figure painters of the 20th century as Matisse, Modigliani and DeKooning. Yet many of his paintings are marked with color accents similar to those favored by icon painters of Kyivan Rus' in the ninth to 13th centuries.

Mr. Hai's art, says Alla Rogers, can be boiled down to sensuous S-curves and bold expressionistic gesture painting in the context of beautiful color balance. "The paintings vibrate with intense emotions and spontaneity that gesture-wise translate into bold swipes of paint, and drips, and scrapes, and complex mergings of color and shape," she points out.

Mr. Tverdun, fascinated since his student days by the unpretentious and yet forceful execution of petroglyphs - prehistoric rock carvings and paintings - showed a series of oils on canvas that concentrated on geometric whirlwinds of color. Imbued with the energy of nature, his medium-size triptychs and individual paintings showed influences of symbolism, surrealism and other art trends. Since 1990 the artist's work has been included in exhibitions in Lviv and Kyiv, and in France, Germany, Norway and Poland.

Mr. Polisczuk, who has exhibited extensively in the United States and Canada in both group and one-man shows for the past 29 years, concentrates on folksy, country themes such as sunflowers, poppies and ducks, and bold portraits of women in Ukrainian regional dress. Delighting viewers, many of his large-scale canvasses centered on flowers typical of the Ukrainian landscape - huge red poppies in full bloom, bright yellow sunflowers in a dark blue vase, stately hollyhocks - and on idyllic village scenes, e.g., "Hutsul Wedding" and "Day at the River," showing women washing clothes at the edge of a stream. Equally fascinating were his large portraits of women in colorful regional costumes, like "Lvivianka," depicting an intense dark-eyed beauty in Lviv-style ceremonial attire.

A graduate of the University of Maryland, where he received his B.A. and a master's degree in fine arts (specializing in sculpture), Mr. Polisczuk is a professor of art at Montgomery College and is co-coordinator of the college's sculpture program. He holds several sculpture awards as well as recognition for teaching excellence (the Montgomery College Alumni Association named him "Teacher of the Year" in 1999), and is listed in such prominent publications as "Who's Who in American Art."

Canadian-born actress Tannis Kowalchuk, co-director of the La Mama resident company North American Cultural Laboratory (NaCl) with husband Brad Krumholz participated in the third annual New York State Theater Education Association's student conference, held at the Nevele Hotel in the Catskills. Ms. Kowalchuk, who recently appeared in the original NaCl production "Asphyxia and Other Promises" at The Piano Store in Soho, taught songs to 400 students at the conference. Ms. Kowalchuk's company is working on a new performance, "Before There Was Rock," based on the theme of evolution, devolution and revolution, and will premiere the show during "The First Ever Catskills Experimental Theatre Festival" at the NaCl work center and theater in Highland Lake, N.Y., in August.
"Est-Ouest" (East-West) and its Ukrainian coterie made it to the Oscars last Sunday but lost out in the Best Foreign Film category to the Spanish nominee "All About My Mother." The French entry, starring Catherine Deneuve, about the ill-conceived decision of a Russian émigré and his French wife to move to the Soviet Union after World War II, included Ukrainian actor Bohdan Stupka in a supporting role and featured members of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Song and Dance Ensemble and the Ukrainian National Swim Team. Most of the film is set in Kyiv.
Oscars 2000, telecast by ABC, paid tribute to the late Hollywood director Edward Dmytryk, including him among those honored in the "In Memoriam" segment of the four-hour star-studded show.
The latest buzz on art is selling works on the Internet, according to WNYC Radio. Alexander Motyl, a Chelsea artist who teaches political science at Rutgers University, can vouch for that. Prof. Motyl, a painter of neo-expressionist cityscapes with 30-plus paintings displayed at PaintingsDirect.com, sold three paintings in his first month on the site. Enthuses Prof. Motyl: "I'm thrilled. The wonderful thing about PaintingsDirect.com is that this hasn't cost me a penny - if I sell something, we share the profits; if I sell nothing, there's no overhead as far as they're concerned either."
A host of actors with Ukrainian derivation appeared on New York area TV screens in March. Winnipeg-born actress Mimi Kuzyk, who played Detective Patricia Mayo in the NBC television series "Hill Street Blues," appeared with Timothy Hutton and Maury Chaykin in "The Golden Spiders: A Nero Wolfe Mystery," shown on A&E on March 5 and re-aired March 11. (Usually cast as an attractive intellectual type, Ms. Kuzyk played a feminist congresswoman in the 1992 ABC movie "Stormy Weathers" and as the first lady in last summer's Wonderful World of Disney movie "My Date with the President's Daughter," also shown on ABC.) Among actors spotted last month in movies which aired on cable channels were George Dzunda ("Impulse"), Elizabeth Shue ("Palmetto"), Jack Palance ("Twilight Zone: Rod Serling's Lost Classics") and Milla Jovovich ("He Got Game").
In its March 13 concert at Alice Tully Hall, the New York Chamber Symphony included the premiere of a mischievously titled quasi-concerto for saxophone and orchestra by composer Igor Korneitchouk, who is of part-Ukrainian ancestry (his grandfather was Ukrainian). Mr. Korneitchouk, who says that the idea for "The Disqualification of Harry Semantix as Trial Juror for East County" germinated from his being disqualified as a potential juror for answering honestly during jury selection, explored the concepts of truth and lie musically in his composition. Born in Madrid, the composer lives in Encinitas, Calif.

| Home Page |