BRAMA, December 6, 2000, 11:00am EST

"SONG TREE" BY YARA ARTS GROUP

La MaMa Experimental Theatre presents Song Tree, Yara Arts Group's tenth original premiere December 21-23, 2000. Last summer Yara's director Virlana Tkacz and video director Andrea Odezynska traveled to Ukraine. Together with Ukrainian artists Maryana Sadovska and Yaryna Turianska, they recorded ancient pre-Christian carols and winter songs in the villages of Poltava and the Carpathians. The resulting creation Song Tree is an original theatre piece in which characters from ancient rituals of "Malanka" and "Koza" descend on a woman who has buried herself in work and science. The production, directed by Virlana Tkacz, features traditional polyphonic Ukrainian female singing and Gogol Bordello, a very hot, explosive Ukrainian ethno-avant-garde band.

The piece was created as a joint collaboration of Yara Arts Group, artists from Ukraine and the band Gogol Bordello. Music is by Maryana Sadovska, Yaryna Turianska and Eugene Hutz of Gogol Bordello. Video is by Andrea Odezynska. The show features the soaring vocals of Maryana Sadovska, as well as Yara's artists Zabryna Guevara, Akiko Hiroshima, Jina Oh and Meredith Wright. The musicians of Gogol Bordello, Eugene Hutz, Sergey Ryabtsev and Alexander Kozachkoff, appear in the piece playing traditional Ukrainian music and their own brand of ethno-avant-garde. They are joined on stage by the singer Piroshka.

Director Virlana Tkacz heads the Yara Arts Group and has created nine original theater pieces with the company, all of which had their American premieres at La MaMa. Video is by Andrea Odezynska, whose film, "Dora Was Dysfunctional," won awards at the Hamptons Film Festival and Rotterdam Film Festival and was an Academy Awards Short Subject Finalist. The piece is multilingual but is easily accessible to English speaking audiences. Its traditional Ukrainian songs are translated into English by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps.

Musical director and co-composer Maryana Sadovska was born in Lviv. She worked with the Kurbas Young Theatre and with Yara on the group's first project in Ukraine in 1991, titled "In the Light." Since then she has been working at the Gardzienice Experimental Theatre in Poland as actor and musical director. She has appeared in that theater's productions of "The Life of Protopope Awwakum Carmina Burana" and "Metamorphosis or The Golden Ass," which she co-created using ancient Greek music. She has organized expeditions to collect Ukrainian folk songs for the last ten years. Co-composer Yaryna Turianska is an ethnomusicologist who has been collecting songs in villages near the Carpathians for ten years. This summer she released the first world music CD in Ukraine entitled "Black Stream." Gogol Bordello, led by Eugene Hutz, has become one of the hottest upcoming bands in America, packing the houses at Joe's Pub and Bowery Ballroom. Eugene Hutz is a founding member of Nova Nomada and the author of the books "Newiurski kazochky" and "Raised by Cats."

Founded in 1990, Yara creates original pieces that explore timely issues rooted in the East through the diverse cultural perspectives of the group's members. The company has created many pieces based Ukrainian material including: "A Light from the East," "Blind Sight," "Yara's Forest Song," and "Waterfall/Reflections." The New York Times (D.J.R. Bruckner) called the last of these, developed with folk singer Nina Matvienko, "a theatrical enchantment given cohesion by choreographed movement and by music on a prodigal scale." Last spring, Yara created "Circle" at La MaMa, an exhilarating World Music-Theater work with artists from the Buryat Republic in Siberia. The Village Voice called it "a stunningly beautiful work [that] rushes at your senses, makes your heart pound, and shakes your feelings loose."

Writing for the Kyiv journal "Ukrainan Culture" Kateryna Talan so aptly characterized Yara as "a unique psychological and cultural experiment. Virlana Tkacz and her actors perform Ukrainian songs, legends and literary texts that speak to people of other cultures. At the same time Ms Tkacz is consumed with what is unique and original about Ukrainian culture and has totally involved her actors in this project. So a dialogue arise between the past and present, between many cultures creating an fascinating model of human understanding."

Song Tree performs Dec 21-23, Thurs-Sat at 8PM, with matinees Friday at 5PM and Saturday at 3PM. Tickets are $15. La MaMa "Theatre of the World" 74 A East 4^th Street, New York, NY 10003 box office (212) 475-7710 For further information please visit our website at: www.brama.com/yara

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