| Yara Arts Group: Poetry into Theatre by Olena Jennings |
|
This year the Yara Arts Group, which combines drama, poetry, song, historical materials, and movement to create original theatre pieces, is celebrating the 20th anniversary of their performances at La MaMa E.T.C. in New York City's East Village and other venues around the world. Yara's performers are skilled at making temporary homes within many cultures as well as collaborating with artists from other countries. Their shows include translations of poetry from Buryat (a Mongolian language spoken in Siberia), Japanese, Kyrgyz, and Ukrainian. Yara creates theatre pieces in rehearsal. At the heart of each piece is a poem. Yara member Olena Jennings speaks with artistic director Virlana Tkacz:
OJ:In 1919 the troupes of Ukrainian avant-garde director Les Kurbas (1887-1937) experimented with staging poetry. This inspired Yara's first performance "Light from the East." How has Les Kurbas's work inspired Yara?
VT: Our first piece was based on Les Kurbas's diaries and also the memoirs of his actors, but that wasn't the piece we started making. We started making a piece about the dreams and hopes of our own actors and when I began seeing parallels between the two it became a piece about Kyiv 1919 and Kyiv Restaurant 1990, which was a famous restaurant right here in the East Village. The actors all played themselves, sometimes a sort of a slightly comedic version of themselves, a heightened version of themselves. Then they also played one of the actors of Les Kurbas's troupe to whom I thought they somehow related.
I had written a thesis on Les Kurbas. I was really interested in the transition between the early period when they wanted to be a rep company, and when they turned into an experimental company. There was very little documentary material about that transition, so I pieced together all that there was and then the actors would speak for themselves about what they thought happened. We wanted to know, "How do you think this happened?" So we wouldn't have the character speak, but the actor would speak for them. We made these differentiations. We called it a docu-dream. It interwove time and dreams and poetry. At the core of this piece were the Tychyna poems from "Instead of Sonnets or Octaves" http://www.brama.com/yara/tych4.htm.
OJ: What was your method of incorporating the poetry from "Instead of Sonnets or Octaves" into the piece?
VT: As we were looking for material to do, I read somewhere that Kurbas's troupes did Tychyna's poetry. I went back and I read the early things and I loved this collection. Even the structure of this poetry is really about this time, the strophe and the anti-strophe, the incredibly beautiful and brutal reality of 1919 and the whiff of freedom and the insanity of the civil war, where you lose your dear friends.
I make all my pieces in rehearsal. I don't necessarily know where it's going when we start. We know where we are starting, with what material, but the piece really comes out of doing things and working with the actors. And that one, huge argument that started in rehearsals was about what we should remember these people for. For their dreams? Or, what happened to them? Should we remember their dream of becoming a famous experimental theatre, of changing reality, of creating a new world on stage? That's really to me what Les Kurbas is about, at his essence. And then people say, but look what happened to him and his actors. They were all destroyed by Stalin. We should be talking about that, but I felt like so much attention had already been focused on what happened to these people as opposed to what they were trying to do.
One of the actors of Kurbas's theatre had been alive shortly before we made this show. I met him doing my thesis and one day when I was talking about these kinds of things he said to me, "History is what happens to dreams." This became part of the lyrics of our last song in the show.