Motanky Doll Making Starts Folk Art Workshop Series

The Kule Folklore Centre sponsored two motanky workshops in November 2009.  Natalie Kononenko, Kule Chair of Ukrainian Ethnography, organized both events. The first took place at St. Anthony’s Ukrainian Orthodox Church and was part of “Super Saturday”, a festival for the children of the parish. The second was in the newly re-located Bohdan Medwisky Folklore Archives at the University of Alberta. The Archive has moved to more spacious quarters in the Arts Building, Room 250.  The new space allows for the hosting of public events.  The first such event was the screening of the Ukrainian horror film Shtol’nia in time for Hallowe’en. The motanky workshops were the first in a folk art instructional series.

Motanky are Ukrainian dolls built from scraps of cloth wound (see the verb motaty  – to wind) around a cloth, birch bark, or wooden base.  Traditionally, such dolls had a dual function.  They were playthings for children and they were also talismans, made to ward off illness and the evil eye.  In more recent times, such dolls and were made by lower-income children whose parents could not afford “store-bought” dolls. Kononenko remembers when she was a newly-immigrated child in New Jersey.  Her grandfather gave her scraps of wood while her mother provided the left-over pieces of fabric that Kononenko as a girl would use to make her own dolls.  With the independence of Ukraine and the revival of interest in Ukrainian traditional culture, motanky are again popular emblems of Ukrainian culture.  They are sold at festivals and Ukrainians buy them for their beauty and also for use as talismans (oberehi).  They are also popular souvenirs for tourists.  

The focus of the two workshops was to make small versions of motanky dolls which would be suitable as Christmas-tree ornaments.  Although the first workshop was aimed at children, in fact the making of the dolls requires quite a bit of manual dexterity and is more suitable for older children or adults. Before the hands-on session, Kononenko gave an illustrated talk on Christmas traditions and their association with crops and the harvest. The participants then watched a short movie from 1942 on Christmas in the Canadian Prairies, specifically Manitoba.  The presentation concluded with a series of illustrations of classical motanky from the literature. 

In the “hands-on” section, the participants first made an angel. This is made from a pre-cut square of fabric with a cotton-ball inserted in the centre for the head. The head, wings, and waist are made by tying embroidery floss around the body of the angel. In both sessions, the participants then made other dolls. The bodies were either built on pre-rolled tubes of paper or on thick fabric rolled up to form the body and arms of the dolls. In both cases, coloured fabric was then added to generate clothing.  Possible items included the skirt (the wide spidnytsia or the narrow plakhta), the kerchiefs (khustka), the vest (keptar), the apron (khvartukh), and the hat (kapeliukha) etc. Students Genia Boivin and Svitlana Kukherenko assisted in the session held in the Folklore Archives. 

The Kule Folklore Centre plans to make the motanka workshop an annual event and to offer a series of workshops.  A gerdan (beadwork) workshop co-sponsored with ACUA, the Alberta Council for the Ukrainian Arts, is planned for February 2010.