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care of some official business before catching my flight back. My business settled, I decided to go for a walk downtown. I stopped at a phone booth to call a friend and realized that someone had stolen my address book, probably thinking it was a wallet. I was really stuck. I was staying with friends in a high-rise in one of the new regions in Kyyiv. I had no idea what the address was or how to get there. The one person I knew who lived downtown was away for the week, another friend had just recently moved. I was beginning to panic when I realized that I stili remembered how to get to Nina’s apartment. I ran all the way and rang the bell. Nina opened the door. She greeted me as if she’d been expecting me. We sat in her kitchen all afternoon and talked. We talked about our recent work, our plans and our dreams. I told her about our work on Forest Song and how Wanda Phipps and I had started working on a book of translations of women’s poetry. She asked me why we never translated any folk songs. I told her I hated the way folk material was usually presented in Ukrainian theatre. Even in Forest Song, I loved the mythic ele ments, but found the “realistic” village scenes distanc ing. The ancient material felt closer to us, than the material from the last century. Then somehow we started talking about the possibility of creating a new, modern context for very old folk songs. We wondered what would be the oldest material we could find. The basic idea for Waterfall/Reflections came out of this talk. Eventually, a mutual friend called Nina’s and pro vided me with address of the place where I was staying. I made my flight the next morning. A few days later we opened Yara’s Forest Song at La Mama in New York. In the fall I started working with my actors in New York on the ideas Nina and I talked about. We started looking into the question of what is really old. We became fascinated with water: “Water has existed since the beginning of geologic history — for at least four billion years. After the planet condensed from primordial gas and dust in space, water spewed from its molten heart and came down in torrents of hot rain. Life began in water, in the seas. Our bodies are made mostly of water. The water in your body was probably once part of a river and then it was part of a tree or maybe even another human being. Water has been here forever, constantly recycling through everything.” Waterfall/Reflections We developed the structure of the piece. The first part would take place in an apartment in New York. A woman would wash her face in the morning and as the water hit her face she would discover ancient aspects of her self which would be conveyed by various Ukrainian folk songs and rituals connected with water. The second part would include a dinner party scene. Each actress would bring the oldest thing she has and relate its story. Most of the stories in our piece turned out to be about our grandmothers. In December 1994 I traveled to Kyyiv to work on the show with Nina. I brought two Yara actors who are also wonderful singers: Karen-Angela Bishop, an African- American, had been to Ukraine the previous spring per forming the part of “Mavka” in Yara’s Forest Song and Cecilia Arana, of Armenian-Peruvian heritage, who had never been to Eastern Europe. When Nina arrived at our first rehearsal in Kyyiv, she asked me what the two American girls were going to do. I said that they would sing with her. She looked at me in total disbelief. How could she even communicate with these foreigners? We did some warm-up, and then I outlined the scenes in our piece. Nina was cordial, but skeptical. I asked her to sing something. She sang a lament, “Ой Давно, Давно”. Cecilia and Karen’s eyes teared up. Of course, they understood something sung so directly to the heart. iThey started to hum armonies with her. As Nina’s eyes welled up, I realized she was having her moment of rec ognizing something familiar in the very different. I knew our piece would have to be about those moments. I also knew we would have to bring this piece back to Kyyiv, because the experience of recognizing something fam- liar in the different was very important in Ukraine today. Ukrainian culture can and must learn to speak to people of all the various backgrounds who live there today. In the beginning of January we had an open re hearsal of Waterfall/Reflections at the “Dakh” Art Cen ter in Kyyiv. Ludmyla Taran called it ”a unique, magical and mysterious piece....” And Ruslan Leonenko wrote in an article that appeared n Svoboda: “The audience in Kyyiv stayed after the show for a discussion. Professor George Grabowicz, from Har vard University and visiting Kyyiv, very accurately noted: The fragmentary nature of this production reveals to us, in a unique way, the oldest elements of Ukrainian culture. As she examined prehistoric mo ments, Virlana Tkacz, consciously or unconsciously, must have felt that the most universal elements of Ukrainian culture are song, ritual and women.” Next morning we all left for New York, where Nina, Karen, Cecilia and I rehearsed the show with Yara actors Yunjin Kim, Shigeko Suga and Oksana Babyi. Waterfall/Reflections premiered at La Mama at the end of January to excellent notice. The New York Times had called it a ’’theatrical enchantment,” adding: “The play really explores the power of folk tale and myth through a wide range of traditional Ukrainian songs and melodies, along with several modern Ukra inian and American poems... All six women in the cast sing, and they sing well. And one cast member, Nina Matvienko, who is a renowned performer of tra ditional song in Ukraine, can produce the kind of thrill one expects only from superb operatic sopranos.”
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