Fall Festival to Honor Ukraine with Folk Music and Dance
By Susan L. Peña
The Fall Festival of the Arts, presented by Trinity Lutheran and Christ Episcopal churches in downtown Reading, continues its new tradition of bringing dance performances to the WCR Center for the Arts with “Barynya: Uniting With Ukraine.” On Sunday, Oct. 5 at 3 p.m., Barynya, a company based in central New Jersey, will provide a program of Ukrainian folkdance and music featuring traditional costumes and folk instruments. It will be a joy-filled tribute to the Ukrainian people, and a chance to reflect on the beauty of Ukrainian culture in the midst of the continuing Russian invasion.
Barynya was founded in 1991 by Mikhail Smirnov, who performs on the garmoshka (button accordion) and guitar. In addition to directing and performing in the company, he is the owner of Barynya Entertainment, a talent booking agency. His wife, Elina Karokhina performs on the domra (a folk stringed instrument with a long neck and pear-shaped body, similar to a lute), and they will bring a singer and a company of dancers.
“We’ll be performing dances from Ukraine, including Jewish, Moldovan and Gypsy dances,” Smirnov said. “We’ll begin with the Kolomyika (a fast-paced dance from western Ukraine) and end with the Hopak, which is the national dance of Ukraine.”
While most of the dances come out of the Slavic folk tradition, including some originating with the Crimean Tatars and Zaporozhian Cossacks, the company will also perform Jerome Robbins’ “Bottle Dance” from the wedding scene in “Fiddler on the Roof,” which has become an audience favorite.
“All of our costumes are authentic, and we order them, including shoes, from Western Ukraine,” Smirnov said. “We also order our instruments from there. It used to take about two weeks for them to arrive, before the war, but now it takes three or four weeks.”
Ukrainian folk dancing has evolved from pre-Christian ritual dances that combined with music, poetry and song; social dances associated with the Cossack uprisings in the 16th to 18th centuries; and folk-stage dance developed in the 20th century by Vasyl Verkhovynets (1880-1938) and Vasyl Avramenko (1895-1981), according to Wikipedia.
Verkhovynets conducted research on folk dances in villages throughout Ukraine, and invented a method for dance notation to record the movements. He is the founder of the modern three-part Hopak; he wrote a book, “Theory of Ukrainian Folk Dance,” and founded the State Folk Dance Ensemble of Ukraine in 1937. Avramenko, who helped in the research, spread the tradition throughout the Ukrainian Diaspora, including North America.
Barynya has performed in Carnegie Hall, the National Constitution Center and the United Nations, as well as at weddings, festivals, parties and other events. All of the dancers come from the Slavic areas of Eastern Europe and are now U.S. citizens; they rehearse in a dance studio in Brooklyn and also provide training in Slavic folkdancing.
