Newark, New Jersey
Newark ( , ) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of New Jersey and the seat of Essex County and the second largest city within the New York metropolitan area.La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in New York. She was educated at
Bennington College
Bennington College is a private liberal arts college in Bennington, Vermont. Founded in 1932 as a women's college, it became co-educational in 1969. It claims to be the first college to include visual and performing arts as an equal partner in ...
and
Columbia University
Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...
, where she earned a Master of Fine Arts in theatre directing.
With Yara she created almost forty original theatre pieces that fuse fragments of contemporary poetry and traditional songs, chants, legends and history from East to create an imagistic production with a narrative. Experimental in their form and essence, they employ video, projected images, and complex musical scores to explore our relationship to time and consciousness. Recent Yara pieces include "1917-2017: Tychyna Zhadan & the Dogs" was about the violence of war and received two New York Innovative Theatre Awards Currently she is working on "Radio 477!" about Kharkiv, Ukraine, based on a jazz score from Kharkiv in 1929.
Theatre productions
Ms. Tkacz has created over twenty-five original theatre pieces that were collaborations with experimental theatre companies from Eastern Europe. These pieces were performed at La MaMa in New York, in major theatres in
Kyiv
Kyiv, also spelled Kiev, is the capital and most populous city of Ukraine. It is in north-central Ukraine along the Dnieper River. As of 1 January 2021, its population was 2,962,180, making Kyiv the seventh-most populous city in Europe.
Kyi ...
,
Kharkiv
Kharkiv ( uk, wikt:Харків, Ха́рків, ), also known as Kharkov (russian: Харькoв, ), is the second-largest List of cities in Ukraine, city and List of hromadas of Ukraine, municipality in Ukraine.Lviv
Lviv ( uk, Львів) is the largest city in western Ukraine, and the seventh-largest in Ukraine, with a population of . It serves as the administrative centre of Lviv Oblast and Lviv Raion, and is one of the main cultural centres of Ukrain ...
and at international theatre festivals, as well as in village cultural centers. Yara's recent piece ''Dark Night, Bright Stars'', was about the meeting of Ukrainian poet
Taras Shevchenko
Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko ( uk, Тарас Григорович Шевченко , pronounced without the middle name; – ), also known as Kobzar Taras, or simply Kobzar (a kobzar is a bard in Ukrainian culture), was a Ukrainian poet, wr ...
and African America tragedian Ira Aldridge, which NY Theatre Wire called "visually striking," writing: "On the surface level, this play is a story about two friends with similar pasts having a cultural exchange, but dig deeper and you discover themes of race and poverty, oppression and liberation, diaspora and the yearning for home." "Opera GAZ" she created with Nova Opera from Kyiv performed at La MaMa in New York in December 2019 and was called “brilliant,” “one of the most searing modern operas” and “a must see.”
In 1996 she began working with indigenous Buryat artists from Siberia. Together they created six original theatre pieces. Based on traditional material, rituals and shaman chants these pieces were performed at La MaMa, in Ulan Ude at the Buryat National Theatre, and in the villages of Aga-Buryat Region, These include ''Circle'', which entered the repertoire of the Buryat National Theatre and recently after its 330 performance became the company's most performed show. The Village Voice wrote: “A stunningly beautiful work, ''Circle'', rushes at your senses, makes your heart pound, and shakes your feeling loose.”
In 2005 Ms. Tkacz worked on a translation of ''Janyl Myrza'', a 17th-century Kyrgyz epic about a woman warrior. After traveling to the Celestial Mountains, she created ''Janyl'', with artists from Yara and the Sakhna Nomadic Theatre of Kyrgyzstan. The show performed at La MaMa in 2007, the capital of Bishkek, the regional center of Naryn and in the Celestial Mountains, where Janyl's story took place. Photographs from ''Janyl'' are featured in ''Kyrgyz Epic Theatre in New York: Photographs by Margaret Morton'' published by the University of Central Asia in 2008. In 2008 Virlana created ''Er Toshtuk'' based on one of the oldest Kyrgyz epics about a magical and darkly humorous journey into the underworld. Ihe show performed at La MaMa in 2009 and continues to perform in Kyrgyzstan. Backstage called it "a small gem," “full of humor and terrific physicality.”
In addition to her work with Yara, Ms. Tkacz directed ''Return of the Native'' for BAM's Next Wave Festival with composer Peter Gordon and video artist Kit Fitzgerald. The piece performed at the Tucano Arts Festival in Rio de Janeiro and at Het Muziektheatre in Amsterdam. She also worked with them on ''Blue Lights in the Basement'', the memorial to Marvin Gaye at the BAM Opera House. At the Aaron Davis Hall she staged Sekou Sundiata's ''Mystery of Love'', ETC. She worked with David Roussève on ''Mana Goes to the Moon'', and also directed plays for the Native American Ensemble, The Women's Project and in Coney Island.
Ms. Tkacz was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the Theatre Institutes in Kyiv in 2002 and in Bishkek in 2008, as well as at the Kurbas theatre Center in Kyiv (2016). She has conducted theatre workshops for Harvard Summer Institute for eleven years and has lectured at Yale School of Drama and Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. She has assisted such directors as
Andrei Serban
Andrei Șerban (born June 21, 1943) is a Romanian-American theater director. A major name in twentieth-century theater, he is renowned for his innovative and iconoclastic interpretations and stagings. In 1992 he became Professor of Theater at the ...
Wilford Leach
Carson Wilford Leach (August 26, 1929 – June 18, 1988) was a Tony Award-winning American theatre director, set designer, film director, screenwriter, and professor.
Biography
Leach was born in Petersburg, Virginia,Sir Peter Hall on Broadway and
Michael Bogdanov
Michael Bogdanov (15 December 1938 – 16 April 2017) was a British theatre director known for his work with new plays, modern reinterpretations of Shakespeare, musicals and work for young people.
Early years
Bogdanov was born Michael Bogd ...
at the National Theatre in London.
Books and translations
Since 1989 she has worked with African-American poet Wanda Phipps on translations of Ukrainian poetry. Their work has formed the core of many Yara theatre pieces and appeared in numerous American literary journals, anthologies and on CD inserts. Their translations used in Yara productions were published in 2008 as a bilingual anthology ''In a Different Light''. Together they have received the Agni Translation Prize, seven NYSCA translation grants and The National Theatre Translation Fund Award for their work on the verse drama ''Forest Song''. Tkacz and Phipps have also devoted themselves to translating traditional material including: folk tales, songs, incantations and epics. In 2005 Tkacz was awarded the NEA Poetry Translation Fellowship for work on the contemporary poetry of Serhiy Zhadan. Yale University Press published ''What We Life For/What We Die For: Selected Poems'' by Serhiy Zhadan in their translations. The reviewer for Times Literary Supplement called Zhadan “a world-class poet” and their translations “masterful.” The book was nominated for a PEN Poetry Translation Award.
Yara's work with Buryat artists led Tkacz and Phipps to collaborate with Sayan Zhambalov on Buryat Mongolian translations. Their work on shaman chants was recognized by the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry Translation Award and led to the publication of their book ''Shanar: Dedication Ritual of a Buryat Shaman'' by Parabola Books in 2002. The book was published in paperback as ''Siberian Shamanism: The Shanar Ritual of the Buryats'' in 2015 and in French as ''Chamanisme Siberien: Le Rituel du Shanr des Bouriates" in 2017.
Tkacz has published articles in ''Theatre History Studies'', ''Journal of Ukrainian Studies'', ''Canadian Slavonic Papers'', and ''Canadian-American Slavic Studies'' and has written about her own work in ''American Theatre''. In 2010 she co-edited with Irena Makaryk ''Modernism in Kyiv: Jubilant Experimentation'', a monumental book on the arts of Kyiv in the 1920s published by University of Toronto Press in 2010. Uilliam Blacker reviewed the book recently for Harvard Ukrainian Studies and wrote: "Irena Makaryk and Virlana Tkacz’s volume on the dynamic cultural life of Kyiv in the age of modernism represents a momentous achievement in English-language scholarship on Ukrainian culture. The volume recovers the neglected but rich modernist culture of Ukraine for the English-speaking reader, but its significance is, by virtue of the scope and framing of the project, also wider than this: in its attention to transnational cultural dynamics and (neo)colonial frameworks and attitudes, the volume represents a corrective to the metropolitan orientation of scholarship on modernist culture."
In 2017 and 2018 together with Tetiana Rudenko and Waldemart Klyuzko, Virlana Tkacz co-curated a series of museum exhibitions on the work of theatre director Les Kurbas. These included: "Kurbas in Kyiv," February-October 2017 at the Museum of Theatre, Music and Cinema in Kyiv, "Kurbas in Kharkiv" at the Yermilov Center in Kharkiv and "Kurbas: New Worlds" at the Mystetsky Arsenal in Kyiv. The catalog for this exhibit is now available on-lin
In 2007 Virlana Tkacz was named “Honored Artist of Ukraine.” In 2021, the ''Virtual Forest Song'' during the COVID-19 pandemic, Covid pandemic was performed online using
Zoom
Zoom may refer to:
Technology Computing
* Zoom (software), videoconferencing application
* Page zooming, the ability to magnify or shrink a portion of a page on a computer display
* Zooming user interface, a graphical interface allowing for image ...
technology to play with images of trees (oak, sycamore, birch and willow) merging with actors, music, and newsreel images of 'burnt and ruined' homes from the conflict zones in Eastern Ukraine.
Productions Virlana Tkacz created with Yara Arts Group
2021 ''A Thousand Suns''
2021 ''Virtual Forest Song''
2019 ''Opera GAZ''
2019 ''Winter Songs on Mars''
2018 ''Following the Milky Way''
2017 ''1917/2017: Tychyna, Zhandan and the Dogs''
2016 ''Dark Night, Bright Stars''
2015 ''Hitting Bedrock''
2014 ''Capt. John Smith Goes to Ukraine''
2014 ''Winter Light''
2014 ''Underground Dreams''
2013 ''Fire, Water, Night''
2013 ''Midwinter Night''
2012 ''Dream Bridge''
2011 ''Raven''
2010 ''Winter Sun''
2010 ''Scythian Stones''
2009 ''Er Toshtuk''
2008 ''Still the River Flows''
2007 ''Janyl''
2005 ''Koliada: Twelve Dishes''
2004 ''The Warrior's Sister''
2003 ''Swan''
2002 ''Howling''
2002 ''Kupala''
2001 ''Obo: Our Shamanism''
2000 ''Song Tree''
2000 ''Circle''
1998-99 ''Flight of the White Bird''
1996-1997 ''Virtual Souls''
1995 ''Waterfall/Reflections''
1994 ''Yara's Forest Song''
1993 ''Blind Sight''
1992 ''Explosions''
1990-91 ''A Light from the East/In the Light''
For more information on Yara Arts Group and photographs se Yara Arts Group