Volodymyr Kish.
Spring, amongst many other things, marks the beginning of the Ukrainian festival season. Over the next three or four months, communities across all of Canada will witness Ukrainian celebrations ranging from small, one day events to week long marathons of art, exhibits, eating, drinking, dancing and indulging in all the best that Ukrainian culture has to offer. The epitome of this is of course, Canada’s National Ukrainian Festival held each August since 1965 in Dauphin, Manitoba. In Oshawa where I live, the week-long Fiesta Folk Festival has been going strong since 1970, and Ukrainian Pavilions have played a major role in its success. At one time, there were four Ukrainian Pavilions at Fiesta, though in recent years this has shrunk down to two.
There are similar folk or multicultural festivals in most areas of Canada where there are significant populations of Ukrainians or their descendants. The major ones in large cities such as Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Edmonton, Winnipeg are well known. Yet even in small communities, this tradition remains strong as witnessed by their existence in such places as Mission (BC), Lamont (AB), Yorkton (SK), Gardenton (MB) and Kingston (ON) amongst many others.
A key feature of any such Ukrainian festivity, is of course, the performance of Ukrainian dance. Nothing quite gets the heart pumping, the feet stamping and the hands clapping as a rousing hopak, kolomeyka or arkan. Back at Oshawa’s Fiesta inaugural, I was a dancer with the UNF Hall’s small dance group. We performed three shows a night for a whole week, at the end of which I was usually at least ten pounds lighter, but probably in the best physical shape I will ever be. Ukrainian dance demands not only a high degree of artistry, athleticism, flexibility and energy, but boundless stamina as well. It demanded a lot of time, practice and dedication, but we did it for the pure love of the dance. As my cousin Hryts would say, “To live is to dance, and to dance is to live!”
Dance is undoubtedly one of the oldest form of artistic expression that mankind has devised. Although archeological evidence of it is understandably hard to find, some of the oldest cave drawings aside from animals and hunting are depictions of what appears to be people dancing.
Our prehistoric ancestors engaged in rhythmic movement as expressions of bonding, ritual celebrations, spiritual feeling and just basic entertainment. By the time we evolved language, writing and the various standard art forms, dance was a well-established fixture of cultural expression and popular entertainment.
So, just what exactly is dance? In Andriy Nahachewsky’s excellent book titled “Ukrainian Dance”, it is defined as a “human motor behavior” that is also “a mode of expression in time and space, it occurs through purposefully selected, controlled, redundant rhythmic patterns.” Of course, that definition hardly does the subject justice. To anyone that has seriously been caught up in the pure joy of the dance, it is an emotional and psychological high that simple words are insufficient and incapable of capturing.
There is something about moving your body to a driving rhythm, of creating flowing movements either alone or in tandem with a group of other people that are perfectly synchronized with you, of expressing emotion through every physical fiber of your being, that bring an adrenaline rush that is hard to duplicate by any other means. Human beings are a complex fusion of the physical, mental, emotional and the spiritual, and all of those factors are highly engaged when we dance. Dance is essentially creating art with no other tool except your body.
I have loved dancing for as long as I remember. I am sure that it is coded into our genes and chromosomes. I have two grandchildren now, and I can’t help but noticing how, without even realizing it, they will often initiate rhythmic movements of their bodies, even without music being present. They seem to instinctively enjoy body movement as an artistic form of expressing mood and emotion.
Even though I am well past my physical prime, I still enjoy dancing. Although I can no longer “dance the night away” as I used to in my youth, I still enjoy navigating my way around the dance floor at a Ukrainian wedding or “zabava” (dance), to the tune of an old fashioned polka or waltz, or engage in some fancy footwork to a rock and roll classic from my teens. As my friend Ron Cahute would say, “Keep dancing, my friends and stay Ukrainian!”
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