YARA CELEBRATES FIFTEEN YEARS

On Saturday, September 24, 2005 Yara Arts Group, a resident company at the world renowned La MaMa Experimental Theatre, will celebrate its fifteenth anniversary. The celebrations will include: the premiers of two films about Yara and a performance of poetry and music from Yara’s theatre pieces. All the events will take place at La MaMa Theatre 74 East 4th Street, between 2nd Ave and Bowery in New York City.

The anniversary celebration will open at 7:00 PM with a world premiere of Andrea Odezynska’s film “The Whisperer.” The recently completed 30-minute documentary explores Andrea's journey to a small village in western Ukraine, where she has an unexpected encounter with Baba Anna, a village healer, that changes the course of Andrea's life forever. Andrea Odezynska (director), and Kathryn Barnier, (producer and editor) will be present and will answer questions after the screening.

A special gala at 8:00 PM will feature “In Verse,” actors performing poetry in Yara’s signature style— interweaving the original Ukrainian verse with English translations and music from Yara’s theatre pieces directed by Virlana Tkacz. Yara artists: Nina Ariadna, Sean Eden, Amy Grappell, Allison Hiroto, Jennifer Kato, Julian Kytasty, Tom Lee, Wanda Phipps, Olga Shuhan, Vera Slywotzky, Meredith Wright among others will perform poetry and music from Yara’s theatre pieces and poetry events.

Yara brings together drama, poetry, song, myth and movement to create original pieces that explore timely issues rooted in the East. Since its founding in 1990, Yara has created sixteen original theatre pieces, among them many on based Ukrainian material, including: Light From the East, about Les Kurbas Explosions based on poetry and documentation about Chornobyl, Blind Sight inspired by the work and travels to Japan of blind poet Vasyl Yeroshenko, Yara’s Forest Song based on Lesia Ukrainka’s verse play, Waterfall/Reflections with Nina Matvienko, Song Tree and Kupala with Mariana Sadovska, Swan, based on Oleh Lysheha’s poetry, and this year’s Koliada: Twelve Dishes. Since 1996 Yara has also worked on theatre pieces with Buryat artists from Siberia. In addition, Yara presents art, music and poetry events, conducts master classes and workshops.

Yara’s first theatre piece A Light from the East focused on the power of art to change the world and incorporated passages from the diaries of Les Kurbas, an experimental theatre director in Kiev in the 1920s, poetry by Pavlo Tychyna, and the dreams of the Yara artists. It premiered in November 1990 at La MaMa Theatre in New York. In the summer of 1991 Yara artists created a bilingual version of the piece with artists from Kyiv, Lviv and Kharkiv. The story of Amy Grappell’s participation in this first Ukrainian-American theatre exchange, which took place as the Soviet Union collapsed and Ukraine declared independence, is the subject of her film “A Light from the East.” The hour-long documentary will be shown at 9:00 PM. A reception follows.

Yara Arts Group
306 East 11th St., #3B
New York, NY 10003 USA

Phone/Fax: 212-475-6474
Email Virlana Tkacz at: yara@prodigy.net

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