DATELINE NEW YORK: Spring arrives in Little Ukraine (04/22/01)

DATELINE NEW YORK: Spring arrives in Little Ukraine

by Helen Smindak

The coming of spring was officially marked in New York's Little Ukraine on April 8 with a charming and sensitive presentation of Ukrainian songs known as "vesnianky," ritual folk songs sung by girls in combination with ceremonial dances and games from early spring until the Feast of the Holy Trinity in June. Bird calls and joyous melodies that used to echo through Ukrainian villages in the springtime breezed airily through the Ukrainian National Home on Second Avenue as a mixed chorus and an ensemble of wreath-crowned young women welcomed spring with songs and ritual circle dances, and youngsters zig-zagged through the audience handing out bird-shaped cookies, recreating ancient customs of Ukraine.

The delightful program was the brainchild of bandura teacher Alla Kutsevych, who brought together the Promin vocal ensemble, members of the recently formed Branch 125 of the Ukrainian National Women's League of America (composed of Fourth Wave émigrés) and their children for the time-honored spring celebration. Close to 45 young people in regional costumes, including a dozen youngsters age 7 to 12, performed lilting airs and humorous tunes from eastern regions of Ukraine - Kharkiv, Vinnytsia, Zhytomyr and Chernihiv - then turned their attention in the program's second half to the regions of Volyn, Ternopil, Stanyslaviv and Yavoriv in western Ukraine. A fanciful mural featuring long-legged storks in flight, flowers, vines and ribbons, the work of artist Erica Slutsky, formed an engaging backdrop.

Although the terms "vesnianky" and "hayivky" ("hahilky", "yahilky") are often used interchangeably, vesnianky are sung from the Annunciation to the Pentecost, while hayivky represent only those spring songs sung during the Easter holiday. Some community residents, believing that vesnianky/hayivky should not be sung before Easter, refused to attend the event, but a sizable crowd of onlookers was on hand nevertheless to cheer the performers enthusiastically.

Ms. Kutsevych served as artistic director and performed in many of the songs and dances, at one point leading a chain of performers that captivated the audience as it wove its way up and down the aisles before entering on stage. Several numbers, like "The Willow Tree," performed by Ms. Kutsevych, a mezzo-soprano, and alto Iryna Hrechko, and "The Cuckoo," sung by a quintet of women, serenaded birds, the harbingers of spring, in distinctive village style with the use of bilyi holos (white voice). The clear tones of Oksana Charuk Bodnar's soprano voice rang out in the repertoire of the Promin ensemble, directed by Bohdanna Wolansky, and in solo pieces like "The Green Grass" and "The Princess." Tania Turikova, Natalia Lemishka and Ludmilla Hrabovska, Branch 125 president, were the soloists for additional vesnianky.

Centered around the ritual portrayal of plant growth and farm work, many vesnianky hailed cucumbers, violets, millet and the oak on the hill. To salute the beetle, performers and members of the audience, standing in two parallel rows, joined arms at the shoulders in a constantly renewing line that enabled 5-year-old Theodore Bodnar to walk along a raised path from one end of the auditorium to the other, while 3-year-old Katrusia Woloshyn scampered through the tunnel below. Participating in several songs and dances were youngsters like Lydia and Gabriella Oros, Lviv's Chereshenky duo, who contributed a song about the pastor's oak tree. Other vesnianky, like the special "ryndzivky" sung at Eastertime by young men of the Yavoriv region, saw male performers bowing low to the women while singing about Easter Day and a worried partridge.

Clad in white, Chrytsia Gorski took center stage as Lady Spring for a circle dance performed with flower wreaths by the women, and later in the program executed a dreamy ballet sequence. Ms. Gorski, a member of the Syzokryli Ukrainian Dancers, was partnered by Ivan Makar, attired in an all-white Kozak costume, in idyllic, slow-moving dances from the Chernihiv and Podil regions.

Ms. Kutsevych, active in New York's Ukrainian cultural scene since coming to New York in 1996, produced a theatrically staged "Vertep" (manger scene) last January that featured a live baby in the crèche. The founder and director of the girls' bandura ensemble Vyshyvanka at the Ukrainian Music Institute in New York, she has become well-established in the community as a bandurist, bandura teacher and Promin singer. Ms. Kutsevych has a special knack for drawing together performers from varied community organizations and religious faiths into a genial cultural entity.

The Easter parade

A few blocks north of the National Home, The Ukrainian Museum continues to create beautiful displays and exhibits that instruct and elucidate on Ukrainian folk arts. For this Easter season, director Maria Shust and museum staffers mounted another exquisite showing of pysanky, grouping decorated eggs from each region of Ukraine in separate glass cases. A large case displays pysanky from all regions of Ukraine, with fine strings stretched taut between each egg and its corresponding location on a map of Ukraine outlined on the back wall of the case, clarifying and pointing up the wide diversity of patterns.

Three weekend workshops in March and April provided opportunities for adults and children to learn the art of making pysanky, using dyes, beeswax and a kystka (stylus); a demonstration by experienced artisans Sofia Zielyk of New York and Anna Gbur of Irvington, N.J., ran continuously during museum hours on April 7, together with a showing of Slavko Nowytski's award-winning film "Pysanka." As always, there were special tours for school groups, and students from the Parsons School of Design who attended several workshops created some very beautiful pysanky.

A late March workshop on Ukrainian Easter traditions, directed by Lubow Wolynetz, with Christina Pevny assisting, offered anyone over the age of 16 a chance to learn about the unique customs and lore of Ukrainian Easter and partake in the hands-on baking of traditional Easter breads.

Ms. Zielyk, currently readying ostrich-egg pysanky for the Ukrainian street festival on May 18-20, led a two-hour pysanka workshop at St. John the Divine Cathedral in upper Manhattan on March 25, teaching the batik-decorating method to a group of fascinated would-be decorators. On April 9, at the invitation of the Ukrainian Students' Club at Pace University, she explained the history, legends and symbols of pysanky and demonstrated her craft for interested Pace University students.

A native New Yorker who learned the traditional craft from her mother, Ms. Zielyk has been accepted as a full-fledged member of the prestigious Association of Folk Artists of Ukraine. She has been demonstrating her art for years at museums, festivals, craft fairs and department stores and on TV (NBC's "Today" show and ABC's "Home" show, among others). Her Easter eggs are on permanent display at New York's Ukrainian Museum and the Embassy of Ukraine in Washington. A traveling exhibit of 250 Zielyk pysanky has toured throughout Ukraine. Photographs of her work are prominently featured in the books "Festivals of the World: Ukraine" (Times Editions) and "Decorative Eggs" (Crescent Books) as well as in her bilingual book "The Art of the Pysanka," published in Ukraine in 1993.

Farewell to KTI

Skipping from the National Home to The Ukrainian Museum, I was brought up short at 157 Second Ave., the premises of Kobasniuk Travel Inc. I had heard that the travel agency had been closed, but the reality had not seeped in. Seeing the dark, iron-grated windows, the dim interior devoid of movement, brought home the stark fact. The hand-lettered sign on the door - Travel Agency "ceased" doing business - put the final stamp on the matter. Despite the black-lettered name on the window that reads "Kobasniuk Travel Inc. Est.1920" and the words below "Air Cruises Tours, Individual & Group Travel Arrangements," KTI was no longer a viable, living institution.

It is sad to contemplate the end of the 80-year-old Ukrainian institution established by the Kowbasniuk family on the Lower East Side, the third oldest Ukrainian business in the United States. Stephan Kowbasniuk, an immigrant from Kolomyia, and his wife, Stephanie Starzynska Kowbasniuk, both schoolteachers, founded the agency in 1920 to provide travel services for the Ukrainian American community. It soon broadened into much more. It became an information center for Ukrainian immigrants, an office that helped with correspondence, translated official documents, handled foreign remittances of funds and offered support and encouragement - a hub of warm humanity to which immigrants gravitated in their need to find knowledgeable, honest and responsible people to guide them.

Vera Kowbasniuk Shumeyko, who said she used to help out as a youngster "by stuffing envelopes and licking stamps, running errands to consulates and entertaining clients in the office by reciting Ukrainian poetry," became chief executive officer in 1953. She continued her parents' hard work, skill and dedication, so that the agency achieved an enviable position in the American and international travel and tourist industry. The name Kowbasniuk Travel was streamlined to Kobasniuk Travel, Inc., often referred to as KTI.

The postwar flood of new immigrants to the United States turned Kobasniuk Travel into a center for processing immigration documents, translating records, reuniting families and providing job information. In the early 1960s the agency processed over 15,000 displaced persons applications and more than 70,000 documents from Ukraine and Poland.

Group tours to Ukraine were instituted in 1960, soon growing to 21 a year, enabling tens of thousands of Ukrainians in the United States and Canada to visit their ancestral homeland and meet family members and relatives in Ukraine. With tour groups came the annual tour reunions at Soyuzivka, where hundreds of KTI alumni and tour escorts gathered on a mellow autumn weekend to show slides of their trips and share reminiscences about travel experiences in an atmosphere of music, fun and comfort.

The names and friendly faces of longtime KTI staffers come to mind - office manager Olga Kowbasniuk Stella, tour department manager Barbara Bachynsky, staff members Olya Shuhan, Halia Hirniak and Marta Danyluk, and Mariyka Helbig, who left KTI after several years to start her own successful business, Scope Travel, in New Jersey. These people are still with us, but Anthony Shumeyko, who had joined the company as its insurance broker, died in 1995, and Mrs. Shumeyko passed away last year after a serious illness. Mr. and Mrs. Shumeyko are remembered for their friendliness and warmth and their community dedication, for generous contributions to Ukrainian Churches, the Ukrainian Studies Chair at Harvard, The Ukrainian Museum, Plast, SUM-A, the Ukrainian National Women's League of America, the School of Bandura in New York and other cultural institutions.

I stood there quietly, wondering: What will happen now with Shumeyko Insurance, which has been operated by Andriy Lastowecky since Mr. Shumeyko's death. Who will take over the building, and for what purpose? My reverie was interrupted by a honking car horn, and I resumed my walk solemnly.

Cirque du Soleil

A few days before Easter, I took a trip to the end of the rainbow. Starting at the World Trade Center, I boarded a PATH train headed for New Jersey, traveled through the Hudson River "tubes" and disembarked at Exchange Place in Jersey City, where I transferred to the automated Hudson-Bergen Light Rail Service for a short ride to Liberty State Park station. A five-minute shuttle bus ride brought me to the blue-and-yellow striped tent city that houses the world-renowned Cirque du Soleil's new live production "Dralion," a two-hour circus-art spectacle of iridescent-colored costumes, a fantastic metallic-glinting decor, music that is a fusion of sounds from around the world and often thunders with beating drums, and multi-talented performers with a variety of high-caliber acts.

Included among the acts - teeterboard, ballet on lights, hoop diving, bamboo poles, single handbalancing, double trapeze and skipping ropes - is the marvelous skill of a juggler from Ukraine. Viktor Kee is not your common, everyday juggler, keeping a few balls aloft in the air with his hands. A lean, muscular athlete, Mr. Kee gives a breathtaking performance that combines amazing balance and grace with sinuous movement as he juggles balls with his head, his torso and his toes.

Mr. Kee is an Adonis, a matinee idol, a charmer. With his short hair dyed red, and wearing a flesh-toned body suit that makes him appear to be naked except for red knee guards and a matching G-string cover, he rolls around a raised stage like an acrobat, balancing and juggling balls on his head and his back, balancing his whole body on one hand. Finally, when his contortions and juggling come to an end, he drops out of sight through the stage floor with a dramatic swoosh. Watching his performance is worth the price of admission, I feel, even though there are many more acts in this Canadian circus spectacle.

Members say that touring with the circus 52 weeks a year can be a trying existence - it's moving from city to city, performing the same taxing stunts night after night, keeping the costumes clean and the sets safe. The people who work on the circus operate out of trailers and eat and share apartments together. But there are benefits: the cast and crew are fed three delicious meals daily from Cirque du Soleil's kitchen, which has five chefs, and they can learn three languages (French, English and Mandarin) free, with Berlitz paid by the circus to go on site.

In addition to Dralion, six other Cirques exist around the world. Fourteen Ukrainian artists are curently touring with Cirques in Japan, Europe and Australia, while another 21 are performing with two permanent Cirque shows in Las Vegas and one permanent show in Orlando, Florida. For the dates of shows, log on to Cirque's website cirquedusoleil.com.

Dralion opened at Liberty State Park in early April and will run through June 3, moving next to Chicago, with another year of traveling to go. Ticket prices range from $63 to $85 for adults and $43.75 to $59.50 for children. Information: by phone (800) 678-5440; on the web, cirquedusoleil.com. Travel by car via the Holland Tunnel and the New Jersey Turnpike Extension I-78, follow my route or use the New York Waterway's ferry service from the World Financial Center in Lower Manhattan (the fastest route), but don't miss Dralion and Viktor Kee.

Helen Smindak's e-mail address is HaliaSmindak@aolcom.

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