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working Ruslana Roscishewska would read these poems for us in Ukrainian, and Yara actors would answer her with our English translation. I also decided to include some of my favorite Japanese poetry by Yosano Akiko (1878-1942), Lady Horikawa (12th c.) and Lady Sono No Omi Ikuha (7th c.) We decided to use them both in the original Japanese and in an English translation and then interwove them with poems Wanda and I wrote. We used this collage of poetry to present the state of mind of Yeroshenko’s friend Kamichika Ichiko, with whom he was in love. In December of 1992 we presented our piece in a workshop production, a first sketch, at our La Mama workshop space. The audience reaction was very posi tive. I decided that we would take this piece to Kharkiv for the Berezil International Theatre Festival in March. I had also received an invitation to conduct workshops with students at the Karpenko-Kary Theatre Institute in Kiev. I decided to go to Kiev ahead of time with one of the actors, Andrew Colteaux, who played Yeroshenko. We would teach the classes at the Institute and at the same time rehearse our play with several Ukrainian actors in Kiev. We wanted to include them into our pro duction of BLIND SIGHT, both in Ukraine and later at La Mama in New York. We arrived in Kiev early in March. In order to intro duce our work to the students, I presented a slide lec ture on La Mama, where Yara is a resident theatre com pany, and La Mama’s long-standing relationship to the East European Avant-Garde. Then we conducted a ser ies of theatre workshops with the students on nonverbal communications in theatre, concentrating on transfor mations and games. We really enjoyed our work with the students and our late night sessions soon became a real event at the Institute. One evening I realized that we were working in the very same room that Les Kurbas had worked in the early 1920s. As soon as we arrived I also started to assemble the Ukrainian cast and staff of BLIND SIGHT. We invited actors Olia Radchuk and Mykola Skharaban from Budmo Theatre Studio in Kiev to join the cast. Our staff was composed of: Attila Mohylny, a poet who would create the Ukrainian text of the piece; Kateryna Slipchenko, the literary manager of the Lviv Young Theatre, who became the project’s Ukrainian dramaturg; Ruslan Leo nenko, a student at the Theatre Institute, who served as assistant director; and Julie-Ann Franko, an American teaching drama in Lviv, who became the assistant stage manager on the show. Together we developed the Ukrainian language aspect BLIND SIGHT. The daily rehearsals were separated into two sections. In the ear lier part of the day I worked with the staff and the Ukrainian actors on the text. Later in the day, I worked with the actors on staging the show. We decided not to translate most of the English text, but to create parallel lines and characters in Ukrainian. Mykola helped to Yara Arts Group in front of the Karpenko-Kary Theater institute in Kiev. develop the part of the bandura player who first intro duced Yeroshenko to music and the idea that the blind can see the world. A 16th century song was included in this scene, while a pre-Christian song to the sun was added to the end. One of the highlights of the show became the bilingual performances of poems by Olia and Andrew, who had no language in common. In the middle of March ten more members of Yara arrived in Kiev. These included five actors: Richarda Abrams, Jennifer Kato, Candace Dian Leverett, Shigeko and Ian Wen; the composer Vincent Katz, set & lights designer Watoku Ueno, sound designer Eugene Kuziw, the American dramaturg Wanda Phipps and the stage manager Nancy Kramer. The entire cast rehearsed the new version for several days in Kiev. The Ukrainian actors now had to blend into Yara’s multilingual produc tion which included scenes in English, Japanese and Esperanto. We decided to add Olia into the Japanese poetry scene. Olia spoke Attila’s translations of the Jap anese poems in Ukrainian, while three women performed in English and one in Japanese. The cooperation and the coordination between the women in this scene was truly amazing. We also took some time off to see the sights of Kiev. Our Americans visited churches, artists studios and cafes with their new-found Ukrainian friends. Peter Bejger, one of the American journalists in Kiev threw a ’’НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, ВЕРЕСЕНЬ 1993 19
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