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Virtual Souls created by the Yara Arts Group and artists from the Buryat National Theatre in photo: Cecilia Arana, Andrew Pang, Tom Lee, Katie Takahashi and Zabryna Guevara as young New Yorkers surfing the Internet. Photo by Watoku Ueno. We now were going to do this show in Ukraine, completing the cultural exchanges initiated in the proj ect. We were going to bring this piece "home," show Virtual Souls to Oleh Lysheha, the poet whose poem had inspired it. I came to Kyiv before the rest of my troupe to work on translating sections of Virtual Souls with Oksana Batiuk into Ukrainian, for local audience. Since the entire show was sung, the new translations would have to match the music and that’s a lot of work. We had already started the process the previous fall when I stopped in Kyiv on my way back from Siberia. In the winter, as we were getting ready for our Kyiv trip, I worked on the songs with Natalka Honcharenko, who had recently joined our production staff as a stage manager. Natalka, it turned out, was a gifted singer and musician and she soon became our musical direc tor. She started to teach our actors to sing some of the songs from our piece in Ukrainian. One of our actors, Zabryna Guevara, who spoke Spanish, had a particu larly good ear for Ukrainian. Her pronunciation was so good, that it was hard to believe she didn't speak the language. From my previous work in Ukraine, I've learned that it is much easier for me if our company in Kyiv grew in size slowly. I first arrived with Tom Lee, Yara actor who played the part of the Hunter in our show. We conducted a master class with the theatre students at the Institute of Culture in Kyiv. In return, the Institute provided us with space to rehearse the Ukrainian texts we had developed. Kyiv was the obvi ous place for our rehearsal because although most our company was from New York, the three Buryat actors in Virtual Souls lived on the other side of the world in Siberia. We decided that the opening scene of Virtual Souls, in the computer world of New York would be sung only in English, but we would create a separate Ukrainian introduction to this scene. As the lights faded at the top of the show a voice sounding like a late night radio host described this world. Imagine: a city were no one works. Or rather imagine a city where everyone works and works very hard but no one goes to work. Everyone is connected to a great web of zeros and ones carrying every fact, each detail we know about our planet. It is the evening of the twentieth century. We sit behind screens Watch floating gray web pages Instantly receive messages from around the globe Fall in love through our computers Fall in love with our computers And believe that someday we will know everything 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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