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Lesia's life that the poem assumed and presented her own version of Lesia. At one point, her character inter rupted the production in an attempt to put an end to the poet's "ahistorical fantasies." This clash of visions was presented with an ironic edge that made the playlet work. Students then explained to Oksana how other characters were presented and how the whole piece came together. It was great to watch such ani mated recounting of what we had done last summer. I had also invited Ludmyla Taran, Natalka Bilotserkivets and Oksana Batiuk to our gathering and they were all authors of text the students had per formed. Later it was great to hear people passionately ar gue their own interpretation of a particular poem in the presence of its author. Last summer, many of the Ukrainian students seemed to think that there could only be one correct version of a poem: “what the author meant." Here was the opportunity for them to meet the authors and ask about it. But now the way they discussed literature had really changed. The stu dents were more interested in relating how the works were interpreted and how this was expressed in the staging. Their experiences at Harvard and Solomea's class certainly had something to do with this change. She was very aware of how discourses of literature change. She had just written a book on the topic "Discourse of Modernism in Ukrainian Literature." Solomea brought the first copy to our gathering. We took turns looking at the volume and stayed up late talking about the poetry, culture and politics in Ukraine today. That night Oksana Batiuk and I planned a little surprise for our gathering. We announced that we would read translations of ours which had just been published by Svito-vyd Journal, in both Ukrainian and the original language. Oksana and I had worked to gether on translations into Ukrainian since 1994 and our work had previously been published in Svito-vyd, so the fact that we were reading our translations was hardly surprising. What was unusual this time, how ever, was that the original language of the poems was Japanese. We had always included texts from Asian lit erature in our theatre pieces. For instance, in Water fall/Reflections, Nina Matvienko sang "Out of the Darkness" with Shigeko Suga and Karen-Angela Bishop. This poem was originally written in the 11th century by Izumi Shikibu, one of the greatest Japanese poetesses. Oksana Batiuk and I translated the poem so that Nina could sing it in Ukrainian, while Shigeko sang in Japanese and Karen in English. Genji Ito, resi dent composer, wrote the music for the poem, so that each language was featured at first alone and then all three were combined at the end in a powerful cres cendo. We had sent our translation of this poem and six others on which we had collaborated for other projects to Svito-vyd. We were very glad to see them pub lished. The timing was perfect. We decided to initiate a new wave of cultural exchange between Ukraine and America, which would open new cultural horizons. I feel that it is very important that Ukrainian culture enter into dialogue with other cultures of the world now. Re gard for the variety of world cultures, rather than belief in a hierarchy of culture which Ukraine must aspire to scale, will bring a true sense of growth and self- respect. It was with this in mind that I had come to Kyiv for the Sixth Berezillia Arts, an international festival of experimental theatres. The Yara Arts Group, which I head, was to open the festival with its production of Virtual Souls. This show exemplified what we meant by "new wave of exchange." It was inspired by the Ukrainian poem "Swan" by Oleh Lysheha and created by members of Yara working together with artists from the Buryat National Theatre in Siberia. (See Our Life, January 1997.) Virtual Souls opens as a group of young New Yorkers surf the Web. Someone opens a web page with the Buryat Chronicles - recorded oral histories - of the Buryats, one of the indigenous tribes of Siberia. As a Bard sings of times long ago, a mythi cal Buryatia is revealed on stage. Through a series of songs and rituals, the contemporary characters in our play see Nature reveal her secrets, and fall into roles in a story of swans which transform into beautiful women. The entire piece was sung to a score by Genji Ito which included such traditional forms of Buryat music as throat singing and accompaniment on a morin khoor, a traditional string instrument. Virtual Souls premiered at La MaMa Annex in January. The press in New York was enchanted with the production. Bert Wechsler called Virtual Souls "the most complete and satisfying show I have seen at La MaMa (and anywhere else) at least since Alice Far ley's" show two years ago. Reviewing the production for the Ukrainian paper Svoboda, Bohdan Boychuk wrote: "Virlana Tkacz has very successfully combined singing, music, dynamic movement and choreography into a unified style which visually transmits not only the narrative, but also the spiritual content and gives us a sense of the Buryat world." Melinda Jo Guttman wrote: "It is as if director Virlana Tkacz used a laser beam to remove thin layers of culture from our eyes and transported us to a primeval state... This Pirandel- lian, richly woven multicultural, multimedia chamber opera, sped through its hour-and-a half like a lucid dream."
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