Culture Change

By Volodymyr Kish

A workshop on Ukrainian folk culture at the recent UNF Convention has got me thinking on just what exactly is Ukrainian culture.  In his talk, Dr. Andrei Nahachewsky of the University of Alberta, contrasted the original immigrant traditional peasant culture with what now constitutes Ukrainian culture in Canada. 

There has been a distinct evolution over the past century plus, and nowhere is this more evident than in Ukrainian Dance.  The original immigrants brought with them the dances they used to indulge in primarily for recreational or social purposes, or ritual dances that commemorated special events such as weddings, Ivana Kupala, harvest celebrations, and the like. 

This changed with the arrival of Vasyl Avramenko to North America, who brought with him a more structured form of these dances and created and taught a more symbolic repertoire of Ukrainian dances that dominated the Ukrainian folk scene here for many decades.  The other distinction of this dance form was that it was geared more for performance than for casual participation by everyone, though it was still the domain of amateur dance groups.

The next major evolutionary step occurred with the arrival and touring of the Pavlo Virsky Ukrainian National Folk Dance Ensemble from Ukraine in North America.  Their form of dance raised Ukrainian dancing from the level of folk to a professional form that incorporated a high degree of athletic ability, artistic staging and costuming, and highly symbolic choreography that borrowed from ballet and other performance dance genres.  This greatly influenced the native Ukrainian dance groups in North America who strove to emulate the Virsky style. They achieved some success in this, though being amateur groups, they could not hope to match the artistic levels of the Virsky dancers who were full time professionals who dedicated their lives to the task, supported by the State, of course, for propaganda purposes.

This brings us to the current Ukrainian dance scene in Canada which consists of a fairly significant number of what I characterize as semi-professional dance groups, the most prominent example being the Shumka Dancers based in Edmonton.  I say semi-professional because, though the dancers themselves are “amateur” in the sense that they have other permanent careers and dance on the side, such groups have a core of professional, paid choreographers, instructors and artistic support individuals.  Their repertoire is strictly geared towards staged performance, and though they have borrowed much from the Virsky style and form, they have also managed to create distinctive dances and choreography of their own, that have roots here in Canada rather than in Ukraine.

So the question is – is this “Ukrainian” dance or something else.  Which is the genuine “Ukrainian” dance form – the original peasant dances of the immigrants, or Avramenko’s version, or Virsky’s adaptations, or those of Shumka?

To me, the answer is of course simpler – they all are.  Culture is not static but changes over time and evolves as a result of changing environments and progress in the social, economic and educational evolution of an ethnic group.  Needless to say, there have always been purists that would like to freeze culture and preserve it as an unchanging entity for posterity. 

There are many proponents of such static culture within the Ukrainian community. They condemn, for example, the use of electric kistkas for making pysanky.  They insist that icons are only genuine if they are made in the original fashion with original materials, i.e. egg tempera paints on wood. They condemn Ukrainian music that uses modern forms, rhythms and tempos such as rap, hip-hop or heavy metal.  They passionately resist changing the language and rigid rituals and forms involved in church services. Let us not confuse the beliefs and essential teachings of religion with the surrounding structure and trappings which are essentially expressions of art and culture.

Such resistance to change is to me is more akin to enforcing archaeology rather than developing culture.  Culture reflects life, and life is not static but ever changing, so culture must change with it.