DATELINE NEW YORK: Tops in their respective fields (05/14/00)

DATELINE NEW YORK: Tops in their respective fields

by Helen Smindak

Champions on ice

To the cheers and wild applause of thousands upon thousands of delighted fans, champion figure skaters Oksana Baiul and Viktor Petrenko of Ukraine made their eagerly awaited appearance at Madison Square Garden last month. Acrobat skaters Vladimir Besedin and Oleksiy Polischuk, who performed as a specialty comedy duo raised the roster of Ukrainians to four in the John Hancock Champions on Ice Summer Tour 2000, presented by tour founder Tom Collin.

The four outstanding skaters have been touring since April 6 with an amazing cast of Olympic, world and national champions, including Michelle Kwan, Dorothy Hamill, Todd Eldredge, Brian Boitano and Elvis Stojko. In the New York area, performances also took place at Nassau Coliseum on Long Island and at the Continental Airlines Arena in East Rutherford, N.J. The tour will cover 34 cities before it ends in Portland, Oregon, May 27.

In a show that bedazzles the senses with movement, sound and color, the Ukrainian representatives contribute a vast amount of grace, agility and composure.

Mr. Petrenko, the final soloist in the first half of the show, brilliantly executed an exciting mambo with a female dummy cleverly attached to his costume. The two went swooping and gliding around the ice with wild abandon, easily accomplishing jumps and turns, and looking for all the world like a superbly synchronized champion skating pair. Mr. Petrenko's programs always blend power, deep emotion and a special audience appeal, whether he is performing to the classics, romantic love songs, jazz or rock'n'roll.

The Besedin-Polischuk comedy duo opened the show's second half with eye-popping and startling feats that included headstands and convolutions by the 150-pound, muscular Mr. Polischuk on the back and shoulders of his partner, the 210-pound, 6-foot-2 inches Mr. Besedin - all of this while skating. Popular in Europe, the Kyiv-area natives were the highlight of the Sun Valley summer ice shows last year and made their Champions on Ice debut during the Winter Tour 2000.

As one of the evening's final soloists, Ms. Baiul created a svelte and alluring impression with her seductive red costume and her sensuous dance to the voice of Cher and the song "Dove L'Amore." As always, she captivated the audience with her talent and charisma, executing turn and jumps without fail. The young woman who took the skating world by storm by becoming the 1993 World Champion at age 15 and, a year later, became the youngest Olympic ladies' champion since 1928, appears to have gained new poise and stability after years of personal problems and severe back injury that sidelined her for most of a year.

Ms. Baiul, Mr. Petrenko and Messrs. Besedin and Polischuk participated in the lavish opening and closing numbers of the show that brought all tour participants on the ice for an extravaganza of solo and group skating.

Artist and feminist

Five large oil paintings by the flamboyant Ukrainian painter and feminist Maria Bashkirtseva (1860-1884) were included in a major exhibition at the Dahesh Museum in Manhattan, closing this weekend after a four-month run. Exploring the landmark role played by the Académie Julian as one of the first arts institutions in France to open its doors to female students, "Overcoming All Obstacles: The Women of the Académie Julian" was shown last fall at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., and will now travel to the Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis, Tenn., for a July 4 opening.

Encouraged to work on more ambitious genres than still lifes and other suitably "feminine" subjects, Académie Julian women turned to portraiture. A standout of the exhibit is Ms. Bashkirtseva's "Self-Portrait with Palette" (1883); another striking portrait is her "Oriental Woman." Both works are on loan from the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nice, France.

Newfound access to drawing from life, a key ingredient of the students' training and professional advancement, is reflected in her important work "In the Studio" (1881), where we see the studious concentration of a women's class gathered around a posing adolescent male nude. Shown for the first time in America, this painting has been lent by the State Museum in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine.

The exhibit includes other oils on canvas by Ms. Bashkirtseva - an 1882 work of Julian Academy model "The Parisian Woman, Portrait of Irma" which comes from the Musée de Petit Palais in Paris, and a portrait of two French boys in black "Jean et Jacques" (1883), courtesy of the Newberry Library in Chicago.

Invited by the Dahesh Museum to attend the exhibit opening were the director and the curator of the Dnipropetrovsk Museum, Ludmilla Tverska and Tatiana Khudova. On their first visit to New York the ladies were also delighted to discover and tour The Ukrainian Museum, where they met staff members and were aquainted with the museum's collections.

Maria Bashkirtseva (the French form Marie Bashkirtseff is used in the traveling exhibit), born in Havrontsi, Poltava Gubernia, left some 150 paintings, including compositions, portraits, études and genre paintings. An aristocrat, she lived her life dramatically, made her reputation painting street urchins and died young from tuberculosis in Paris. Her diary, severely edited by relatives, was published in Paris in 1887 as "Journal de Marie Bashkirtseff" and became a fundamental doctrine for feminist causes in the 20th century.

The internationally known Dahesh Museum, named for the renowned Lebanese writer, philosopher and art collector Dr. Dahesh, is committed to preserving, exhibiting and interpreting European academic art of the 19th and 20th centuries.

A top fashion model

Richard Gladys may be a new name to the Ukrainian American community, but anyone who's strolled past Versace's Fifth Avenue windows in recent months, spotted a Versace or Valentino ad in a fashion magazine, or leafed through a current Versace catalogue has seen his face. His penetrating blue eyes and finely sculpted features, topped by pale blond hair, and his lean 6-foot-2 frame merit instant attention.

Discovered by a photographer while beach-tanning during a Florida vacation some six or seven years ago, Mr. Gladys embarked almost immediately on a full-time modeling career. "The photographer introduced me to the business and had me starting in front of the camera with working photographers," he recalled recently for "Dateline New York."

Mr. Gladys has worked extensively in Milan for the Valentino fashion house and is the leading male model for the Versace fashion domain's current ad campaign. He has been featured in runway shows in New York and Milan, and is constantly on the go for photo shoots - from New York to Los Angeles to Europe.

Top fashion magazines around the world that have been carrying Mr. Glady's image in sensual Versace ads include Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, W, Elle, British GQ and Detour, with Italian Vogue coming soon. His face and figure also appear in Versace billboard ads.

The 25-year-old native New Yorker is taking it all in stride, even meeting and working with "cool people like Jennifer Lopez, Amber Valetta and other top models." He was named by model.com to the 25 Top Male Models list (he's No. 5 in the standings), placing him among the male models who rule the current campaign, editorial and advertising market. Models.com describes him as "one of the most aerodynamically perfect human specimens alive."

Mr. Gladys, who is affiliated with ID Model Management of Manhattan, is the son of Tamara Dyba Gladys of Lake George, N.Y., and Ryszard Gladys of Fort Johnson, N.Y. His maternal grandfather, Osyp Dyba, a prominent businessman in the city of Striy in western Ukraine, settled in New York in 1949. He and his wife Stephania once ran the Cosmos Parcel Agency in the East Village.

An April deluge

With "Dateline New York's" in-basket overflowing with news of April events and information from many quarters, the only way to update everyone on recent arts/entertainment happenings is to call on a favorite expedient: the alphabet.

"Circle," a new performance art piece staged by the Yara Arts Group during a three-week engagement at the La Mama Experimental Theater, transported viewers to the world of the Buryat people who live near Lake Baikal in Siberia. From summer trips to Siberia, Yara director Virlana Tkacz and her group create theatrical works blending East-meets-West idealism, Buryat performance styles and Mongolian throat singing. "Circle," expressing the Buryat notion that the spirit world is constantly with us, shifted from a traditional Soviet-style wedding dinner with a gypsy wedding band to the Buryat spirit world with wild round dances, beautiful girls singing traditional Mongolian songs and grandmothers transforming themselves into girl-spirits who put things right. The overall effect was bewitching, thanks to the talents of Ms. Tkacz and her ensemble, throat singer/musician Battuvshin, music composed by Buryat composer Erzhena Zhambalov and Gogol Bordello's Eugene Hutz, design by Watoku Ueno, costumes by Rachel Comey and video by Andrea Odezynska. Soaring Buryat vocals were performed by Mr. Zhambalov and Badmahanda Aiusheyeva.
Film entertainment in recent weeks has included the sumptuous, moving Oscar nominee "East-West" (mentioned in an earlier column), set in Kyiv and Odesa and centered on the brutal betrayal of a Russian émigré couple from France who accept the offer of Soviet citizenship and the chance to rebuild their motherland. Still playing at the Paris Theater on West 58th Street in Manhattan, the film is enlivened by Ukrainian actor Bohdan Stupka in a supporting role and views of Kyiv's domed churches, the Dnipro River, the Ukrainian Army Song and Dance Ensemble performing in a grand hall (in Ukrainian) and the Ukrainian National Swim Team practicing for Olympic competition in a huge indoor pool.
The Polish film production "With Fire and Sword," screened before a capacity audience at the Ukrainian Institute of America, provides full play for Bohdan Stupka's acclaimed thespian artistry in the role of Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky, leader of the Zaporozhian Host. The film depicts the Kozak-Polish conflict that began in 1648 as a typical Kozak uprising but turned into a war of the Ukrainian populace against the Polish Commonwealth. Mr. Stupka is a dignified, thoughtful hetman; the Kozaks are energetic and fearless in war, boisterous in song and dance, and wonderful]y daring as they pen their famous letter to the Turkish Sultan. Though the Kozaks appear rough and sometimes primitive next to elegantly uniformed Polish officers, viewers expressed delight with the film's Ukrainian conversation and music and pleased to hear well-loved folk songs - "Oy, Chyi to Kin Stoyit" (Whose horse is that?) and "Nalyvajte, Brattia, Kryshtalevi Charky" (Brothers, Fill the Crystal Wine Glasses). As background music, the melody of the Ukrainian song "Chaban" lends a beautifully romantic ambiance to a professionally high-grade film.
"Heaven's Gate," the epic $36 million western by Michael Cimino about wealthy cattle barons who conspired to murder German, Bulgarian, Russian and Ukrainian settlers encroaching on their lands, has been released by MGM Home Video as a DVD. The three-and-a-half hour recreation of Wyoming's Johnson County wars in the late 1880's, though dubbed a failure when it was released, has been re-assessed, with many European critics declaring it a masterpiece. You may recall that Stephan Scherby of New York, then a psychology major at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, was a member of the supporting cast, and the movie included several Ukrainian folk songs, among them "Chohozh Voda Kalamutna?" (Why is the Water Murky?).
"Fight Club," the Twentieth Century Fox film starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter, which hit the movie screens last fall, is based on the novel "Fight Club" by Chuck Palahniuk, who lives and works in Portland, Oregon. Does the name Palahniuk sound familiar? You've probably heard it as the family name of actor Jack Palance, although Chuck Palahniuk and Volodymyr Palahniuk are not related. Though published by W.W. Norton & Co., it's been established that the novel's author is Ukrainian on his father's side. Janet Maslin of The New York Times described the movie as "far more visionary and disturbing" than "American Beauty," while Hillary Johnson of the Village Voice claims that which drives Palahniuk's novel is what she calls "the emasculation of Western civilization." Expanding on that notion through the film's publicist, Mr. Palahniuk comments: "We are a nation of physical animals who have forgotten how much we enjoy being that. We are cushioned by this kind of make-believe, unreal world and we have no idea what we can survive because we are never challenged or tested." He has written two subsequent novels - "Survivor" and "Invisible Monsters."

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