Blue Angel 6/24

AN ANGEL IN THE ROOM
Svitlana Matviyenko

On Sunday June 24th, at the Ukrainian Institute of America the Yara Arts Group presented a special art and poetry event. For the first time Yara’s ‘ROUND US (KOLO NAS), which usually takes place in Kyiv, took place in New York. Kolo Nas #15 – Blue Angel 6/24 featured the poetry of Marjana Savka from Lviv, translated by Askold Melnyczuk and interpreted by Swiss conceptual artist Andrea Loux.

We started the ‘ROUND US series of art events five years ago in Kyiv, when Virlana Tkacz was there in the fall of 2002 as a Fulbright Scholar teaching at the Karpenko-Karyi Theatre Institute. Every time Virlana came to Ukraine, she would always gather people together for unusual events, inviting her Ukrainian friends, poets, writers, actors, scholars and the Harvard Summer School students who took part in her workshops. Often, poets were asked to read their poems. The evening in the early September 2002 was special. Virlana had invited seven poets to read their works to an audience composed entirely of people who wrote about poetry or performed it. I recall the room was just large enough for the crowd: people were sitting and standing everywhere, sipping wine, talking… Seven poets – Natalka Bilotserkivets, Liudmyla Taran, Oksana Zabuzhko, Neda Nezhdana, Anatoli Dnistrovyj, Ivan Andrusiak and Mykola Miroshnychenko read their poems and then Virlana read a new translation she was just working on of a poem by Serhiy Zhadan. Professor George Grabowicz was there and commented on the works read, Tamara Hundrova, Rostyslav Semkiv and I rounded out the litcrit section. There were also two wonderful actors who participated in Virlana’s very first project in Ukraine: Oleksi Bohdanovich and Mykola Shkaraban, who often performed Ukrainian poetry.

The intense experience of the rhythm of the poetry punctuated our breath. We were together in the room, inhabiting the space of poetry. As Virlana recalls, “the reactions to each poem were immediate and visceral.” Sharing such a close space with poets, allowed us to be completely immersed in the rhythm of the poems. This was the beginning. Afterwards, Virlana convinced me to help her organize another poetry event at a gallery, where the audience could experience that intensity of presence we felt that first night. We decided that we could emphasize the intensity of the poetry by intentionally “installing” the reading in an intimate space occupied simultaneously by other art. We wrote a flyer that announced the concept of the ‘ROUND US series: “What is presence? Can you hear it? See it? Experience it? Capture it? Imagine it? Presence is communion. Communion is interaction.”

Our next event took place at the Dim Art Gallery in the Sofia Museum of Literature. For ‘ROUND US # 2, we invited Serhiy Zhadan and Andriy Bondar, two young poets, whose poems were “cutting-edge, determined, critical” as Natalia Feduschak of Kyiv Post wrote afterwards. Virlana had already translated several more poems by Zhadan. I remember how she first became interested in them. We were sitting in her kitchen and she was making dinner, preparing rice and vegetables. I had brought Serhiy Zhadan’s latest book Ballads of War and Reconstruction and several issues of Literatura Plus, the All-Ukrainian Writers Association’s newspaper, which I edited at that time. The latest issue contained Zhadan’s newest poems, written in Vienna. Virlana asked me to read them out loud while she cooked. I read “The End of Ukrainian Syllabotonic Verse,” the first poem she would translate.

Over the next five years Virlana and I organized eleven more events in galleries. We eventually found a home in the RA Gallery – where we also did play readings, featured songs by Mariana Sadovska, and most recently screened a film – The Whisperer by Andrea Odezynska.For our first event in New York, ‘ROUND US #15, we chose the poetry of Marjana Savka, from Lviv, who came to Boston to participate in the International Poets’ Exchange Program this spring. Ms. Savka is a well-known poet in Ukraine. She published her first collection of poems when she was twenty-one. Since then she has published eight other books, for which she has received numerous awards. A former actress and journalist, she has written over a hundred articles on various subjects, and edited We and She, an anthology of poems by women writers from Lviv. She is also a co-founder of the Old Lion Publishers that specializes in children books and poetry. For our event we used the Ms Savka’s most recent poems written in Boston both in the original and in translations by Askold Melnyczuk. The translations are included in the chapbook, Eight Notes from the Blue Angel, that was published by Arrowsmith Press only two weeks before our poetry performance. The book is composed of eight poems and all eight poems were staged during our event. The Blue Angel in the title refers to Marlene Dietrich the subject of one of Ms. Savka’s poems: “Who, Marlene, Who?” which follows the traces of presence of this woman, admired by many, but known by few. Ms. Savka performed her poetry in Ukrainian while American actor Ezra Knight performed them in English. Choreography for the performance was created by Swiss artist Andrea Loux. We met Ms Loux in 2002 in Kyiv, where she participated in the group art exhibit at the Center for Contemporary Art. Ms. Loux’s work moves between the areas of performance, installation, video and photography, connecting them one to the other. She brings into focus the thematic complex of establishing and transforming spaces and situations. For our poetry event with Marjana Savka, she created a visual vocabulary and choreography for the texts, playing with the aspects of interaction between performer, audience and space.

The space of the Ukrainian Institute is stunning. We wanted to install the performance in this space of the mansion, allowing it to envelope both the performers and the audience. When the audience arrived, they gathered in the Board Room on the first floor. They sat in chairs and expected the readers to appear. Instead, after a short introduction by Virlana Tkacz, they were asked to follow the sound in the space. Soon we heard Marjana singing a traditional Ukrainian song about a young man being recruited into the army. As they came up the stairs they saw Marjana and Ezra standing back to back one at one end of the Chandelier Room and the other at the other end of the Concert Room. They were connected by a long piece of fabric, a tail, linking one jacket to another with one piece of cloth: the costumes were a “second skin” the performers shared. Through it they were in touch. The audience gathered around the singing poet. Marjana finished her song and began one of her poems. Ezra responded with the translation, which the audience heard over the sound system, which “brought” his presence into the space, although he remained at a distance in the Concert Room to which the doors were half closed.

The interplay between various degrees of presence was important for us: the presence of the performer’s voice in the space and the presence of the voice at a distance, the presence of the performer in the same space as the audience and a performer in a different room. The performers were “connected” in several ways. Apart from the fabric tail, there was the “technical” connection, through the sound system. At the moment when we were standing around Marjana, listening to her dialogue with Ezra, the space seemed to be “folded up.” We did not experience it fully unless Ezra’s voice was heard clearly from the opposite room. His mediated appearance in our room made us aware of the other space and allowed us to fantasize, unfolding the space in our mind. In this sense, we perceived the space of the mansion as a participant. Marjana then moved to the Concert Room and the audience followed her. As they came through the half-closed doors they found the chairs arranged not in rows, but scattered in the space back to back with no sign of where the performance would take place. When everybody was seated, the performers approached each other, eventually circling back to back, mirroring the way their audience was seated. The performers played with the fabric tail and their jackets, taking them off in attempt to free themselves of this connection and, at the same time, revealing their fear of losing the second skin they shared. This drama of hesitation was finally resolved when they tore off their tail and ran out of the room leaving it on the floor…

I believe that the performance of poetry in two languages, where the original is interwoven with the translation, exhibits a similar drama of approach. The translation tries to precisely express the original poem, at the same time it must express the essence of the original poem through another language and culture. The two languages spoken out loud create a new rhythm, they touch each other and then the meanings these words have appear and disappear. At the moment of this intersection, the strangest thing happens – a blue angel enters the room.

Also read about BA: http://brama.com/yara/kolonas15.html