Yara Arts Group to celebrate its 15th anniversary with special program (09/18/05)

Yara Arts Group to celebrate its 15th anniversary with special program

NEW YORK - Yara Arts Group, a resident company at La MaMa Experimental Theater, will celebrate its 15th anniversary on Saturday, September 24. The celebrations will include the premieres of two films about Yara and a performance of poetry and music from Yara's theater pieces. The events will take place at La MaMa Theater, 74 E. Fourth Street, between Second Avenue and the Bowery.

The anniversary celebration will open at 7 p.m. with a world premiere of Andrea Odezynska's film "The Whisperer." The recently completed 30-minute documentary explores Ms. Odezynska's journey to a small village in western Ukraine, where she has an unexpected encounter with Baba Anna, a village healer, that changes the course of her life forever. Ms. Odezynska (director) and Kathryn Barnier (producer and editor) will be present and will answer questions after the screening.

A special gala at 8 p.m. will feature the program, "In Verse," with actors performing poetry in Yara's signature style, interweaving the original Ukrainian verse with English translations and music from Yara's theater pieces directed by Virlana Tkacz.

Yara brings together drama, poetry, song, myth and movement to create original pieces that explore timely issues rooted in the East. Since its founding in 1990, Yara has created 16 original theater pieces, among them Ukrainian-based material, including: "Light From the East," about Ukrainian avant-garde theater director Les Kurbas (1887-1942); "Explosions," based on poetry and documentation about Chornobyl;"Blind Sight," inspired by the work and travels to Japan of blind poet Vasyl Yeroshenko; "Forest Song," based on Lesia Ukrainka's eponymous verse play; "Waterfall/Reflections" with renowned Ukrainian singer Nina Matvienko; "Song Tree" and "Kupala" with Ukrainian vocal performance artist, composer and folklorist Mariana Sadovska; "Swan," based on Oleh Lysheha's poetry; and this year's "Koliada: Twelve Dishes." Since 1996 Yara has also worked on theater pieces with Buryat artists from Siberia.

Yara's first theater piece, "A Light from the East," focused on the power of art to change the world. The work, which incorporated passages from the diaries of Les Kurbas, poetry by Pavlo Tychyna, and the dreams of the Yara artists - premiered in November 1990 at La MaMa. In the summer of 1991, Yara artists created a bilingual version of the piece with artists from Kyiv, Lviv and Kharkiv.

The story of Amy Grappell's participation in this first Ukrainian American theater exchange, which took place as the Soviet Union collapsed and Ukraine declared independence, is the subject of her film "A Light from the East." The hourlong documentary will be shown at 9 p.m. on September 24.

The evening's program will conclude with a reception.

Tickets for the celebratory program are $20; $10 for artists and students. For additional information call Yara at (212) 475-6474. For updates, visit Yara's web- site at www.brama.com/yara.

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