Last Workshops of the Tour!

We have a busy festival schedule ahead of us so Tyler and I decided to get up a bit early to try to create a bit of spare time in our day. We had hotel breakfast and took a walk out to the market. The internet says the market opens at 8 AM. We arrived there around 8:45 but it was clear that the set up was just in its early stages. It was clear we couldn’t get any meaningful perusing done so we tottered back to the hotel and bought a lot of water on the way home for the days ahead.

Before we knew it, it was time to hop on the bus to go to our Poltava workshops. They were run by the Poltava State Ensemble, the same group that performed at the opening ceremonies. We had two separate workshops that were each about one hour. The first workshop was in a basement dance studio. When we arrived, we could hear the tail end of the workshop before us (all the groups in the festival had staggered workshop times). I have no idea what group it was but Shane said the director was saying “pohanu” (terrible) and “uvohu” (be quiet). I was a bit nervous and expected the workshop to be very hard. As it turned out, the choreography we learned was reasonably simple. As a result, it was possible to watch the style of the actual Poltava dancers and really try to copy their body positioning. Another funny thing was that the director did not stand up once during the workshop; his dancers demonstrated and he shouted from a chair on a pedestal at the front. The good thing was he was usually saying “molotsi” (something like wonderful) so I guess we did pretty well.

In a snap, it was upstairs to the stage for the second workshop. It was run by one of the Poltava ensemble senior dancers who had an epic moustache (see photo). Again the choreography was quite simple. The most interesting and difficult to execute part was this one dance where you had to deliberately sickle your feet. It has been so engrained into me from the age of three not to sickle ... it actually was physically painful to make my lower legs do that. They explained this move is supposed to mimic shaking something gross off your shoe. It was really interesting to try but I don’t think that particular style will be coming to Canadian stages anytime soon.

The bus shuttled us back to our hotel but we decided not even to go upstairs to save time. We walked to a place called Burger & Meat for a quick lunch. The burgers were really good (I think Drew would have loved them). In keeping with most of this trip, we had just a tiny bit of spare time before needing to prepare for our show. It was ambitious, but Tyler and I decided to make a quick run to the market to look at the art and succeeded in buying a beautiful painting of a Ukrainian cottage that was painted by an artist in Lviv.

(Rest of the day in a second post)

BrookeRead more