Virlana Tkacz writes:
Theatre makes the past present, alive at the moment that you are witnessing it. The characters as well as the texts, poems and songs breathe with new life, and so a new future opens up for them. I am interested in creating theatre that is rooted in little-known or appreciated cultures of the East, giving voice to them. I have made theatre pieces about a modernist theatre in Kyiv in the 1920s, ancient Siberian ghost stories and Kyrgyz epics. Each of these theatre pieces opened a new world for me, the other artists involved and our audiences.
I am the artistic director of Yara Arts Group, a resident company at La MaMa Experimental Theatre in the East Village in New York. We create original theatre pieces in rehearsal by bringing together fragments of songs, stories and chants. At the core of every piece is a poem that sets the piece in motion. Since 1990 we have created 20 original theatre pieces that have premiered in New York, and are usually collaborations with artists from the other side of the world. Our productions feature traditional music, but are essentially contemporary pieces. Performed in a combination of languages, they are completely accessible to American audiences.
The first time I recorded songs in villages was in the Aga Buryat Region of Siberia. I soon learned that the older women in a community are usually the best source of songs, stories and knowledge about a traditional society. We created such pieces as “Flight of the White Bird” based on songs we heard from grandmothers in Aga, while “Circle” was based on songs and stories from the Ust-Orda Buryat Region on the other side of Lake Baikal.
Eventually, I also recorded songs in Ukrainian villages to create “Song Tree,” “Koliada: Twelve Dishes” and “Still the River Flows.”
In Central Asia I worked on two theatre pieces we made out of the rich Kyrgyz epic tradition. “Janyl Myrza” was a true story about a 17th century woman warrior from the Celestial Mountains. The heroine was, however, strangely silent in the 70 page epic about her. We traveled to villages where the story took place to record women’s laments and songs in order to give her a voice.
This March I will be working in Kyiv on a new theatre piece with Ukrainian singer Nina Matvienko and her daughter Tonia, as well as Kyrgyz artists Kenzhegul Satybaldieva, Ainura Kachkynbek kyzy and Nurbek Serkebaev. “Scythian Stones” constructs parallel journeys for two young women from village and nomadic traditional life into the city. Their separate journeys become epic descents into the Great Below –the modern global desert where songs, skills and languages disappear, leaving behind only mute markers like the Scythian Stones found today throughout the grasslands of Ukraine and Central Asia.
“Scythian Stones” will have a workshop production in Kyiv on March 26, 2010 www.brama.com/yara Then we will travel to New York to rehearse the piece here, adding members of our company. “Scythian Stones” opens April 17th and plays Thursdays –Saturdays at 8PM, plus Sundays at 2:30 till May 2nd at La MaMa Experimental Theatre, 74 East 4th St, in New York. www.lamama.org