Quincy Mark Robinson and Professor Colleen West, Dance

Background

When Ukrainians migrated to Canada in the early 1900’s, they found themselves in a completely different cultural environment. To help support each other in this foreign environment the Ukrainians participated in many cultural activities, one of which was staged Ukrainian folk dance. In the 1990’s staged Ukrainian dance in Canada began to change because of the immigration of choreographers from Ukraine. With the fall of the Soviet Union, many choreographers became unemployed and immigrated to Canada to work with the Ukrainian dance movement there. These choreographers brought with them new ideas and movements and helped spur a change in the way Ukrainian dance is performed in Canada.

Research

With this change in Ukrainian dance in Canada, I and Benjamin Watson decided to compare the quality and authenticity of staged Ukrainian dance in Canada with that in Ukraine. We hypothesized that Ukrainian dance in Canada would be different, both through choreographic motivation and through the performance of specific regional dances. To test our hypothesis we decided to, in both countries, film Ukrainian dance groups and interview the directors of each of the dance groups. The video footage of the dancing would allow us compare both the dance technique and the performance of regional dances and the interviews would allow us to compare the opinions of the directors regarding what they felt are important aspects of Ukrainian dance, when (and if) change is allowed in Ukrainian dance, and what they used as motivation for their choreography.

Canada

In Canada we attended the Cheremosh dance festival held in Edmonton, Alberta because we were told that some of the best Ukrainian dance groups attended this festival. While there we obtained roughly twenty hours of Ukrainian dance footage and we were able to interview four different directors of Ukrainian dance groups, including the directors from two of Canada’s top Ukrainian dance groups, Cheremosh and Shumka. It was interesting to note that two of the directors we interviewed were Ukrainians who had migrated to Canada and the other two were of Ukrainian descent and were from Canada.

While in Edmonton we also had the opportunity to interview Dr. Nahachewsky, a professor at the University of Alberta. Dr. Nahachewsky is an expert on Ukrainian dance and he was able to provide us with a lot of background information regarding Ukrainian dance in Canada as well as the changes that have occurred in Canadian Ukrainian dance within that last few years.

Ukraine

In Ukraine we attended two different international folk dance festivals, one in Komsomolsk and one in Lutsk. The Komsomolsk festival had one Ukrainian dance group in attendance and the Lutsk festival had two, which aloud us to obtain some video footage of Ukrainian dancing. Due to limited performances at the festivals we were not able to get the same amount of dance footage as we did in Edmonton. Because of this we decided to switch the focus of our research to just the interviews conducted with the directors of the groups. With this new emphasis on interviews we refocused our efforts on meeting directors and we were able to obtain some excellent interviews while in Ukraine.

One struggle we encountered during our time in Ukraine was that our translator in Komsomolsk could barely communicate in English. Not only did this make coordinating with festival difficult, but it also made the interview we had there very difficult. We had to speak very slowly and distinctly, and would often have to rephrase our questions just so the translator would be able to understand our questions. Throughout the interview we kept hoping our questions were getting through to the directors. We filmed the interviews and, when we returned to Provo, we had a Ukrainian who is fluent in English translate the interview for us. Because of this second translation we were able to find out what the directors were saying (and we could tell just how bad the original translation was!).

Results

We found that both the directors in Ukraine and Canada commented on the importance of using traditional steps in the different regional dance styles. The directors also emphasized the importance of creating the feeling of Ukrainian dance. Each felt that it was important for the dancers to include Ukrainian pride with their dancing, that the movement alone was not enough.

One difference in opinion among the directors was in regards to how much creativity (or change) is permissible in Ukrainian dance. The Canadian-born directors in Edmonton were more open to change as long the Ukrainian spirit was maintained in the dance while the rest of the directors, both the Ukrainian immigrants and the ones in Ukraine, felt that creativity was only permissible within very strict bounds and with no mixing of regional dance styles.

Presentations

Using our research we did a presentation for the World Dance Division of the Department of Dance at BYU in October of 2006. We applied and have been accepted to present at the Utah Conference on Undergraduate Research, February 2 and 3, 2007, and we were invited to present at the Annual National Folk Organization (NFO) Conference, to be held in Salt Lake City, March 2007. This research will also be published as an Honors Thesis.

Future Research

Though we did find some interesting information, more research needs to be conducted before any conclusions can be reached regarding the general opinion of Ukrainian dance directors in both Canada and Ukraine. More directors from each country should be interviewed to provide a larger sample size, and the interviewers should make sure to interview both types of directors in Canada, those who are Canadian-born and those who emigrated from Ukraine.