REVIEW: "Song Tree" by Yara Arts Group offers winter solstice magic
by Cathy Zadoretzky
NEW YORK - I love the Lower East Side of New York City. It is wondrous, formidable, and constant. It is a reservoir of individual expression and uniqueness, and the historical home of international cultures. My immigrant Ukrainian forebears settled here. All kinds of people have come here to realize their true selves, like refugees from political oppression and young artists escaping mass production. Here, life and art and work are one. It's tradition.
It is here that the Yara Arts Group, directed by Virlana Tkacz, premiered "Song Tree," a theatre piece based on Ukrainian New Year's folk art and music. It was performed before rapturous audiences at La MaMa E.T.C. for the all too brief period of December 21 to 23. The mysteries and antics of "Malanka" and "Koza" were introduced to New York theater-goers in an exhilarating and original production. Neighborhood locals like myself left freshly aroused by these ancient transformation festivities.
It was a musically mad, merry and somewhat mod fantasy. An extremely beautiful combination of diatonic, chromatic and modal melodies swept our winter blues away. Traditional Ukrainian and Gypsy songs and "ethno-avant-garde" music by the Gogol Bordello band conjured a sacrificial lab technician to dance to her death and give new life to the sun. Songs were performed by supernatural characters: the sun, a goat, a bride, a bear, a crane and a swallow. A Gypsy band deftly mediated between physical and magical worlds. Life was ritualistically taken away and restored with a song.
The ancient carols and winter songs of this production were collected in Ukrainian villages by Maryana Sadovska and Yaryna Turianska. They collaborated with Eugene Hutz of Gogol Bordello to create the music for Song Tree in both Ukrainian and English languages. Piroshka, a Gypsy singer and dancer from the Lower East Side, performed traditional and popular Gypsy songs in the original Rom.
They were joined on stage by Zabryna Guevara, Akiko Hiroshima, Jina Oh and Meredith Wright as riveting vocalists who brought singular energy to the paradoxical creatures of the fables. The set contained true and simple reproductions of a Malanka hut and Koza folk art by Watoku Ueno. Andrea Odezynska's iconic video projections of singing village grandmothers, waves of lake water, and giant salt crystals gave entrée to the re-enactment of the myths.
Winter solstice magic on the Lower East Side? It surely was. If you were lucky, you were there to experience it, and to walk away uplifted by a novel vision of spring to come.
Cathy Zadoretzky has written articles about Ukrainian cultural events over the years for The Ukrainian Weekly, America and the Ukrainian Herald. A resident of the Lower East Side, she says she feels "soulfully bound to it." She adds: "My grandparents settled here and my parents were raised here; and in fact, my grandfather Peter Zadoretzky had a Ukrainian radio program for 30 years in New York, spanning the inter-war years to the 1950s."
Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, January 28, 2001, No. 4, Vol. LXIX
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