July 9–16, 1998

reviews|dance

Virsky Ukrainian National Dance Company

Merriam Theater, June 30-July 1

		One sympathizes with the impulse to fashion such a shiny past, but nationalism founded on such myth-making is inherently probematic

Last week the Virsky Ukrainian troupe gave us two nights of bright, theatrical Ukrainian folk dancing. The company was large (indeed, too large for the entire group to fit comfortably on the Merriam stage), skillful, dazzlingly energetic, and the presentation was much enhanced by brilliantly colorful costumes and live musicians. The audience, many of whom seemed to be Eastern European, loved it; I was at one with them in appreciating the dancers' remarkable ability, but I am not an admirer of the spirit underlying this kind of "folk" performance.

The idea of the folk was one of the many inventions of nationalistic European intellectuals in the 19th century. The uneducated common people, long regarded as little better than brutes, came to be seen as possessing a body of traditional beliefs and practices (folk "lore") that were to be appreciated as the product of uncorrupted collective wisdom that arose from living close to nature. The Grimms' collections of German peasants' tales started a wave of interest that produced similar anthologies throughout Europe and elsewhere. Especially in Eastern Europe, where the task was to create national cultural identities for the primarily rural peoples living within the Austrian and Russian empires, songs, tales, proverbs and dances were collected that were regarded as manifestations of the heart of the nation, true Lithuanian-ness or Polish-ness or, in this case, Ukrainian-ness, and as such more authentic than the veneer of cosmopolitan life to be found in the towns and cities.

During Soviet times, where any genuine expression of national feeling was regarded as subversive and dealt with accordingly, a kind of cleaned-up, picturesque official folklore was permitted, even encouraged, so long as it did not arouse separatist ambitions. The best-known example of this kind of "fakelore" was the Moiseyev company, which toured the United States extensively during the 1960s and '70s. They illustrated the paradox of folk performance: the true folk spirit, emanating as it does from an authentic way of life, is preserved only by denaturing it—i.e., by having the dances performed by professional dancers, who are of course more skilled than the folk themselves, "entertainment" values are enhanced but at a fatal cost. The cold war is over, of course, but the same spirit seems to live on, with the Virsky ensemble being a current example of the same impulse.

To some extent the Virsky's program offered just such a hollow, idealized version of traditional Ukrainian folklife, which was essentially destroyed by the Soviets when they collectivized agriculture in the 1930s. Virsky therefore returns to prerevolutionary times and presents women as demure village maidens and men as macho Cossack warriors. In view of Ukraine's unhappy past, one sympathizes with the impulse to fashion such a shiny, ahistorical past, but nationalism founded on such myth-making is inherently problematic.

The most impressive thing about the evening was the talent of the dancers, which for me outshone the choreography. Virsky's version of Ukrainian dance is heavily male-oriented, with perhaps half the program's 13 numbers taking the form of the challenge, in which each of the men gets to do his favorite virtuosic turn, whether it was dizzying spins on the head or flying high turns around the stage or the familiar "kazatske" squat. These moves, diverting and impressive the first and second time we saw them, tended through repetition to outstay their welcome. Some variety was provided by the more lyrical women's interludes—Embroiderers, which ingeniously employed colored fabric, was a standout—and we even had some humor now and then, but the dancers deserved more in the way of choreographic imagination than was provided.

-Robert Ackerman