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VIRTUAL SOULS IN SIBERIA BY VIRLANA TKACZ We performed Spinning Spells, our bilingual evening of poetry by Ukrainian women, at Soyuzivka on Saturday to an audience that included both Soyuz Ukrai- nok and Suzy-Q participants. The show started on a somber tone with several poems dedicated to the 10th anniversary of Chornobyl. Then we did a few ancient in cantations - prayers to water and the sun. We hit full stride with the ironic delights of the modern women poets Oksana Zabuzhko, Ludmyla Taran, Victoria Stakh and Oksana Batiuk. The audience loved them. People in the back were yelling out affirmations; the ladies in front laughed. A self-described "old lady" wrote us one of the all-time great thank-you notes. She was delighted, she wrote, that we were from so many different races and backgrounds and all reveling in the poetry of Ukrainian women. Yes! poetry can bring all kinds of people to gether. Our new project, Virtual Souls, had already put us in touch with a whole new world of people. Originally, it was inspired by a Ukrainian poem - Oleh Lysheha's "Swan." I loved the poem and started looking for mate rial on swans. The most fascinating swan myths were Buryat. "The swan is our mother and the birch - our fam ily tree," say the old Buryats. The Buryats live in Siberia in the area around Lake Baikal. Buryatia has been part of the Russian Empire since the 17th century and today it is a republic within the Russian Federation. The Buryat Chronicles start with a legend about a hunter who sees wild swans take off their swan dresses and turn into beautiful girls. He steals one of the swan dresses, while the girls are swimming in Lake Baikal. Startled, most of the swans fly off, leaving one behind to plead with the hunter to give back her dress. We included this legend in our new piece, Virtual Souls, and Yara was invited to the Buryat National Theatre to work on the project. I was to leave for Ulan Ude the morning after the Soyuzivka event. We squeezed back into the car and drove to Manhattan. I tried to come up with a list of things I should take. There was no putting off packing now. I was going to Siberia next morning. I reminded myself to make back-up disks of all the important files and dozed off. Next morning socks, wires, batteries, projectors, tea bags, scripts, sweaters, disks and dictionaries were still standing in towering piles next to the suitcases when Tom Lee, the actor who was traveling with me, arrived. We stuffed the suitcases with what we could, hoping someone else would bring the rest and piled into a cab for the airport. JFK was crazier than usual. Only a few days before a plane had fallen out of the sky. The secu rity was tight and we had a lot of strange stuff. But it was only many many hours later in Omsk that anybody no ticed. Omsk was not a stop-over we planned or even knew about. At first we refused to get off the plane. Our ticket said Moscow - Ulan Ude, and I was not going to get off anywhere else, especially some place I had never even heard of before. And four o'clock in the morning Omsk looked pretty dismal. But it got exciting enough when we tried to get back on the plane. We had to go through a security check again. I had a tiny laptop in my hand luggage and was not going to let them put it in that old x-ray machine. I was showing the amazed lady guard that this tiny computer actually worked, when suddenly there was all this yelling. The guard near the x-ray ma chine did not like the looks of some of the things in our bags. He had asked Tom "Vashe? Vashe?" [Yours? Yours?] several times and had gotten no reaction, so he started screaming. I yelled in Ukrainian trying to explain that Tom doesn't understand Russian because he's an American. But this didn't seem plausible to anyone. Tourists don't come to Omsk and certainly don't try to get on Ulan Ude flights in the middle of the night. I didn't want to step away from my computer. I was afraid that I'd never see it again. The computer is our office, our script, our research and our link to the rest of the world. But the situation was escalating. I ran through the metal detector with one of my bags in hand - it started ringing. I said to the guard. "He doesn't understand what you are saying." The guard looked at me surprised and let Tom go. Someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was the lady guard. She handed me the laptop. I prayed that she hadn't run through the metal detector with it. I turned the computer on. It still worked. We got on the plane. A whole crew of people met us in Ulan Ude. Vladlen Pantaev, one of the composers on our project, Tania, his wife, the Buryat actors, and their friends. They drove us to the apartment they had rented for us. We dropped everything off and after sprinkling some milk and vodka, a shamanist custom that would be repeated on many occasions, we drove off into the countryside. We arrived just in time for a great occasion - the blessing of the corner stone for the first datsan, Buddhist temple, to be dedicated since the Revolution. In the steppe stood a ger, a round tent. It was filled with grandmothers. We ’НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, СІЧЕНЬ 1997 17 Erzhena Zhambalov, Tom Lee, Erdeny Zhaltsov, Sayan Zhambalov and Virlana Tkacz meet in the lobby of the Buryat National Theatre in Ulan Ude, Siberia.
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