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Yeroshenko. She was fascinated, so was everyone else who heard the story. But they would often ask me if I was making it up. I decided to read up on his life and I found that Yeroshenko’s story was even more incredible than I had remembered. Vasyl Yeroshenko was born in 1890 in the village of Obukhovka in the Belgorod region of Russia, just across the border from Kharkiv. His father was Ukrainian and worked on the estate of Count Orlov-Davidov. Accord ing to his sister Maria, Vasyl and the rest of the family considered themselves Ukrainian. When Vasyl was four years old he became ill, and went blind as a result. Later he would write: “I screamed and cried as I left the land of colors and sunlight.” Then he remembered sitting in a corner for a long, long time. But eventually, the obviously brilliant child, with perfect pitch, learned to live without seeing his world. When he was nine, his landowner, who was on the board of the Moscow School for the Blind, sent Vasyl to be educated there. At the school, Yeroshenko learned to read Braille and disco vered literature. He also sang in the children’s choir and played the violin in the orchestra. He graduated from the school when he was 18 and started playing with the Orchestra for the Blind. One day after a performance he met Anna Sharapova, an eccentric relative of Tolstoy’s, who urged him to pursue musical training at the Con servatory for the Blind near London. Anna was a fanatic Esperantist and inspired Yeroshenko to learn this lan guage. She also arranged for her Esperanto friends to help him make his train connections across Europe. With their help, Yeroshenko traveled to London in 1912 and enrolled at the Royal Institute and Musical Academy for the Blind. Several months later, he was expelled from the school for riding a horse at night. The young man was very humiliated. He decided to go to Japan, where he had heard that the blind were respected. In the spring of 1914, Yeroshenko traveled by himself to Japan, taking the train across Siberia. He arrived at the home of Professor Nakamura, who headed the Esper anto Society of Tokyo. Yeroshenko lived in Japan from 1914-21, learned Japanese and within two years was publishing his own stories in Japanese. He became friends with a number of fascinating people, including Akita Ujaku, a Japanese playwright who introduced him to the Japanese literary circles, and Kamichika Ichiko, one of the first Japanese female journalists. At the time Yeroshenko also traveled to Thailand, Burma and India. In the early 1920s he lived in Beijing staying for two years at the home of Lu Xun, China’s most important writer of the 20th century. Lu Xun translated a number of Yeroshenko’s stories into Chinese and that is how a lot of his work was preserved. Yeroshenko returned to Moscow in the late 1920s and was arrested several years later for contact with foreigners. He spent over twenty years in various labor camps and was released in 1952, only a few months before he died. After his death, the authorities burned his manuscripts, which were written in Braille. Yara Arts Group creates original theatre pieces by assembling fragments of literary texts, historical mate rial, poetry and song. We create scenes in rehearsal using this material as our text. In our production of BLIND SIGHT we portray Yeroshenko’s discovery as a child that he is blind. In the dark voices yell out the names of various ordinary objects that threaten the blind child. Yeroshenko learns to navigate in the dark by counting his steps. Then we stage his meeting with a blind bandura player who introduced him to music and inspired him to “see the world.” We also present his meeting with Anna Sharapova and his trip to London. Most of BLIND SIGHT, however, focuses on Yero shenko’s first encounters with various aspects of Japa nese culture. We were fascinated with excerpts from Yeroshenko’s diary in which he described his first days in Japan. Yeroshenko had to discover the physical aspects of Japanese culture without any visual cues and without yet speaking the language. His guide was the eight-year-old daughter of Professor Nakamura, Toshiko. We started working on this scene with Shigeko, one of the actors in our group who is Japanese. We decided that she would speak only Japanese in the scene and Andrew Colteaux, who played Yeroshenko, would speak only English. He would have to learn from her that the Japanese ate with sticks, took off their shoes before entering their homes and slept on grass mats. We im provised the scenes using a dialogue that was based on my own experiences in Japan when my guide to daily life was the five year old Yachan. The resulting scenes, were some of my favorite in the show. Much of our information on Yeroshenko’s life came from Japanese sources, which Watoku Ueno, Yara’s set designer, would read to us translating as he went along. I also found some Ukrainian and Russian material on Yeroshenko and even met Alexander Kharkovsky who published a biography of Yeroshenko in Moscow in 1977. We also found fascinating information on Yero shenko and his friends through the help of some wond erful librarians. I wanted Yeroshenko’s writings to be an integral part of our piece. We decided to use sections of Yero shenko’s autobiographical works “My School Days” and “Wise Man Time.” We also staged his “Tale of the Paper Lantern”, the first story he published in Japanese. A brief excerpt from his “Land of Dreams” became one of the key scenes in the production. Before we could even try any of the pieces in rehearsal, Wanda and I, of course, had to translate them into English. So our pro ject also included a lot of translation work. Yara productions have always included poetry and in BLIND SIGHT we used poems such as Pavlo Tychy- na’s “She Glanced — Light” (Podyvylas — iasno”) to convey Yeroshenko’s inner life. When we first started 18 "НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, ВЕРЕСЕНЬ 1993 Видання C оюзу Українок A мерики - перевидано в електронному форматі в 2012 році . A рхів C У A - Ню Йорк , Н . Й . C Ш A.
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