Tom Lee (Groom) Eunice Wong (Bride) and Badmahanda Aiusheyeva (Unexpected Guest) Photo by Watoku Ueno The Bride makes a wish at her wedding. Photo by James H. Schriebl The faux-grandmas watch the wedding festivities. Photo by James H. Schriebl The musicians of Gogol Bordello appear at a Buryat wedding Photo by James H. Schriebl The spirits pull the groom from the bride. Photo by Watoku Ueno The spirits wrap the bride to take her off to their world. Photo by James H. Schriebl 19th c shaman drawing of the nine dancing spirits Matriarch from Ust-Orda who taught us several songs in show. Photo by Alexander Khantaev.

Creative Recycling: Yara Arts Group and Circle
-- Kristina Lucenko

Forthcoming in Slavic and East European Performance, Vol. 20, No. 2. Subscriptions to the journal (which regularly includes articles on Ukrainian theatre and performance) can be obtained by writing to: Slavic and East European Performance, c/o Martin, E. Segal Theatre Center, The City University of New York Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016-4309.

Virlana Tkacz knows collage. Founding director of Yara Arts Group, a New York–based theatre ensemble, Virlana assembles drama, poetry, music, dance, myth, and movement into multimedia, multilingual explorations that resist summation and disavow conventional plot. Her performances, usually around an hour long (she can’t stand long plays, she says), are compressed, ethereal ruminations on language and culture, on dreams and folklore. Ukrainian, Japanese, and, most recently, Buryat myths and histories have all found their way into Yara plays. Virlana incorporates different cultural elements into her pieces that interrupt and echo each other, seamlessly blending in such a way that it’s hard to pinpoint where one ends and the next begins.

These transformative qualities are present in Yara’s newest piece, Circle, which ran at La MaMa ETC’s Annex Theatre from March 24 to April 9. The show, which is based on folk songs and legends from the Ust-Orda region of eastern Siberia, tells the story of a modern-day Buryat wedding gone bad. Its genesis came out of the songs and stories that Virlana and her Buryat collaborators, Erzhena and Sayan Zhambalov, collected during a four-week trip to Ust-Orda last summer. Virlana has worked with the married couple, young stars of the Buryat National Theatre, on her last three Buryat-infused productions. "Sayan and I would listen to these tapes together, first transcribing the songs, then typing them out in Buryat, then translating them into English. It was a lot of work." The songs they liked most—called "yoxors," or round dances—are traditional rituals songs performed today during holidays and family occasions, and so they thought, why not stage a wedding? Moreover, they had collected a number of ghost stories, which, if enacted within the context of a wedding, would certainly complicate things. "Where’s the fun in a happy wedding anyway?" asks Virlana.

The ghost story that most enchanted the group was that of Duhkey, a beautiful young patron saint of Buryat women unhappy in love. In the play, Dukhey, played by Erzhena, casts a magic spell over the groom, played by Tom Lee, as the festive ceremony quickly falls apart. The giddy joy of the wedding is heightened by the chaotic energy of Gogol Bordello, a downtown New York band that plays gypsy punk music. "You expect the play to get funnier, louder, and more raucous," says Virlana, "but suddenly the spirits arrive and turn everything upside down. It’s a little scary. It’s no longer light." With her bewitching siren’s song, Dukhey is a female power capable of destruction as well as of creativity. Her charms are too seductive, making it hard for the groom and the bride (played by Eunice Wong) to resist. They are no longer two happy-go-lucky kids getting hitched. They are the worst kind of lovesick—anguished and obsessed. "And that is what is so fascinating about weaving spirits into the texture of a play. The mood is funny and it moves along, but then all of the sudden it turns dark," says Virlana.

Dukhey’s legion of ghostly followers (called Ulean spirits) who float across the stage look eerily ethereal, thanks to the modern and immobile white frocks designed by Rachel Comey. Their graceful movements, choreographed with fine restraint by Igor Grigurko, seem to mirror an elusive icy landscape, as much an interior as an exterior one. "In a book of Buryat legends I have," says Virlana, "by the turn of the century Dukhey had collected 350 girls who were unhappy in love. But no matter how attractive the Ulean girls look—with their flowing white dresses and their graceful movements—you do not want to be part of that world."

Because Virlana appreciates randomness, Yara’s collaborative process is receptive to strange associations and coincidences. "The show evolved out of many rehearsals," she says. "We couldn’t have done this on the first Buryat show [the 1997 Virtual Souls], but because it’s our fourth show together, Sayan and Erzhena trust our intentions as far as exploring Buryat culture. They don’t have to insist on who they are. Add a cast of 25 and treat everyone like a thinking person, and soon people brought in songs and stories in Japanese, Korean, and Swedish, offering their own interpretations." The result of such a far-reaching process might be muddled were it not for the hauntingly resounding and unifying Buryat songs performed by the cast, which includes Badmahanda Aiusheyava, who is considered the best young singer of traditional Buryat songs, and Battuvshin, an astonishing throat singer. Andrea Odezynska, another frequent Yara collaborator, created the hypnotic video projections that locate the play in a dramatic natural landscape. Extreme close-ups of water and ice evoke a frozen terrain while close-ups of fire are interposed with images from the groups’ travels. Footage of Buryats in traditional costumes look like they are burning—in danger of being destroyed forever but also strikingly vibrant and alive.

The image of the consuming fire speaks to Virlana’s desire to not only remember the songs and the folklore but to allow the stories to inspire new works of art. "Ukraine and Buryatia have these cultural masterpieces and no one in the West has ever heard of them. So the difficulty is figuring out which parts of the traditional texts will speak to an audience outside of the culture. How do you make a play with Ukrainian stories and songs that non-Ukrainians will like? How do you make it art as opposed to artifact?" And in addition to having access to magnificent texts and songs, being Ukrainian has influenced Virlana’s approach to the Buryats. "While collecting songs and stories in Siberia, I brought my skills as a Ukrainian and Russian speaker, as well as the sensitivity of being a Ukrainian in a Russian empire, having your culture edited and erased. It’s like the first time your mother said, ‘Oh, Encyclopedia Britannica is wrong.’ The idea that there are many other points of view. I feel like I have a real ‘other’ point of view to a lot of things."

When asked when she began working on Circle, her eighth play, Virlana answers, "I never stopped working on the first one." For Virlana, the details may shift and change, but each new play continues this core experiment: to create original theater from elements of traditional Eastern cultures. Or, as Virlana says, "take a bunch of old songs and make a play out of them." From the words and images that intrigue her—frozen, fire, spirit, Buryat, Ukrainian, unhappy wedding, round dance—she pieces together resonant dramas of myth, memory, story, and song.

about the author:
Kristina Lucenko lives in Brooklyn.