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24 WWW. UNWLA.ORG “НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, ТРАВЕНЬ 201 3 Yara’s Fire. Water. Night. — Wild. Cultured. Mechanized. Digitalized. This summer Yara Arts Group will mark the centennial of Lesia Ukrainka (Larysa Kosach - Kvitka , 1871 - 1913) with an original theatre piece that will draw on her best known play , Forest Song . This verse drama, written by Ukrainka in 1911, remained unstaged in her lifetime. It was first produced in 1918 by the Kyiv Dramatic The a- tre and eventually becam e a mainstay of Ukrai n- ian theatre. In 1993 the play was translated into En g- lish by Virlana Tkacz and African - American poet Wanda Phipps who received the National Theatre Translation Fund Award for their work. As Vi r- lana herself put it, “[i] n the spring of 1993 I started reading Lesia Ukrainka’s Forest Song . The first few scenes, in which forest spirits conversed about life, while humans were portrayed as i n- truders, totally enchanted me. How different it was fro m anything else I had ever read! I called Wanda Phipps and shared some of the fragments. She liked the scenes and we started translating the play before I actually finished reading it. I loved how elements of nature came alive in Ukrainka’s text and wanted to give them a greater voice. I remembered a N ative American poem in which the formation of ice was portrayed as a conscious decision by the water. I started looking and found poems by American writers that gave voice to trees, plants, and soil. I also wove poetry by an Eskimo shaman and Japanese poet s into the scenes.” In 1994 Virlana Tkacz directed a bilingual version of the piece with Yara and Les Kurbas Theatre in Lviv. She called the production Yara’s Forest Song to undersc ore the fact that it used only segments of the original and also included works by American, Canadian, Ukrainian and Japanese poets. It performed as a work - in - progress at Bucknell University in 1993 and at the Kurbas Young Theatre in Lviv in the spring of 1994. Yara’s Forest Song premiered at La MaMa Experimental Theatre in June of 1994. Both Ukrainian and American press r e- sponded well to the production. “Director Virlana Tkacz has transported Forest Song , a Ukrainian classic by Lesia Ukrainka, into a da zz ling pa r- able for your time, using sound, song, movement, as well as both English and Ukrainian language... The use of Ukrainian myth, combined with poetry and songs ranging from David Wagoner’s “Lost” to Van Morrison’s “Gloria” makes Yara’s Forest Song exotic, enchanting and tho ught provoking. Ms . Tkacz and Wanda Phipps deserve much credit for taking such diverse material and sea m- lessly adapting it into a co herent theatre piece,” wrote Marc Raphael, NY Casting. Leonid Hrabowvsky wrote for Svoboda , “I must admit I was amazed by t he accuracy and mastery of the textual ‘images’ Virlana Tkacz used to expansively stretch the canvas of the drama, approaching the original text with the attitude favored by the Noh theatre. This choice created waves of scintillating ideas, out of which th e concept of the show arose like Aphrodite out of the foam.” Now Virlana Tkacz returns to Ukrainka’s text again, offering a new look at the classic drama. Fire. Water. Night. uses segments of the Tkacz/Phipps’ English translation, along with contemporary p oetry and ancient songs incor - porated into an original musical score to tell about the disruption of the cycles in nature. The production moves through the spaces of La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre to explore our rel a- tionship to water, trees, fields and ou r digital landscape. Through various levels of engagement the audience becomes a participant or witness to the constantly moving performance, becoming immersed, activated and taking part in the action.
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