Virlana Tkacz

During the pandemic lockdown, Virlana Tkacz created Virtual Forest Song, revisioning fragments of Lesia Ukrainka's classic 1911 verse play, which she translated with Wanda Phipps, and setting them in the future after some ecological catastrophe.

The show was created, rehearsed and performed live on zoom, Yara's Virtual Forest Song.

Technology was used to play with images of trees (oak, sycamore, birch and willow) merging with actors, music, and newsreel images of 'burnt and ruined' homes from the conflict zones in Eastern Ukraine.

Recent Yara pieces include "1917-2017: Tychyna Zhadan & the Dogs" was about the violence of war and received two New York Innovative Theatre Awards.

Recently, she directed Yara's "Radio 477!"

about Kharkiv, Ukraine, based on a jazz score from Kharkiv in 1929.

Ms. Tkacz has created over thirty original theatre pieces that were collaborations with experimental theatre companies from Eastern Europe, especially Ukraine.

These pieces were performed at La MaMa in New York, in major theatres in Kyiv, Kharkiv and Lviv and at international theatre festivals, as well as in village cultural centers.

Yara's recent piece Dark Night, Bright Stars, was about the meeting of Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko and African America tragedian Ira Aldridge, which NY Theatre Wire called "visually striking," writing: "On the surface level, this play is a story about two friends with similar pasts having a cultural exchange, but dig deeper and you discover themes of race and poverty, oppression and liberation, diaspora and the yearning for home."

Other recent Yara theatre projects include Scythian Slap! about the Futurist painter David Burliuk and Radio 477! inspired by a 1929 jazz musical about Kharkiv.

In 2023 Yara collaborated with Ping Chong & Company to create Undesirable Elements: Ukraine.

In addition to her work with Yara, Ms. Tkacz directed Return of the Native for BAM's Next Wave Festival with composer Peter Gordon and video artist Kit Fitzgerald.

The piece performed at the Tucano Arts Festival in Rio de Janeiro and at Het Muziektheatre in Amsterdam.

She also worked with them on Blue Lights in the Basement, the memorial to Marvin Gaye at the BAM Opera House.

At the Aaron Davis Hall she staged Sekou Sundiata's Mystery of Love, ETC. She worked with David Roussève on Mana Goes to the Moon, and also directed plays for the Native American Ensemble, The Women's Project and in Coney Island.

Virlana Tkacz (born June 23, 1952, in Newark, New Jersey) is the founding director of the Yara Arts Group, a resident company at the world-renowned La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in New York.

She was educated at Bennington College and Columbia University, where she earned a Master of Fine Arts in theatre directing.

With Yara she created forty original theatre pieces that fuse fragments of contemporary poetry and traditional songs, chants, legends and history from East to create an imagistic production with a narrative.

Experimental in their form and essence, they employ video, projected images, and complex musical scores to explore our relationship to time and consciousness.

Since 1989 she has worked with African-American poet Wanda Phipps on translations of Ukrainian poetry.

Their work has formed the core of many Yara theatre pieces and appeared in numerous American literary journals, anthologies and on CD inserts.

From 1996 to 2004 Virlana worked with indigenous Buryat artists from Siberia.

Together they created six original theatre pieces.

Based on traditional material, rituals and shaman chants these pieces were performed at La MaMa, in Ulan Ude at the Buryat National Theatre, and in the villages of Aga-Buryat Region, These include Circle, which entered the repertoire of the Buryat National Theatre and after its 330 performance became the National Theatre's most performed show.

The Village Voice wrote: "A stunningly beautiful work, Circle, rushes at your senses, makes your heart pound, and shakes your feeling loose."

Ms. Tkacz was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the Theatre Institutes in Kyiv in 2002 and in Bishkek in 2008, as well as at the Kurbas Theatre Center in Kyiv (2016).

She has conducted theatre workshops for Harvard Summer Institute for eleven years and has lectured at Yale School of Drama and Tisch School of the Arts at NYU.

She has assisted such directors as Andrei Serban, Ping Chong, George Ferencz and Wilford Leach at La MaMa, as well as Sir Peter Hall on Broadway and Michael Bogdanov at the National Theatre in London.

In 2005 Ms. Tkacz worked on a translation of Janyl Myrza, a 17th-century Kyrgyz epic about a woman warrior.

After traveling to the Celestial Mountains, she created Janyl, with artists from Yara and the Sakhna Nomadic Theatre of Kyrgyzstan.

In 2005 Tkacz was awarded the NEA Poetry Translation Fellowship for work on the contemporary poetry of Serhiy Zhadan.

The show performed at La MaMa in 2007, the capital of Bishkek, the regional center of Naryn and in the Celestial Mountains, where Janyl's story took place.

Photographs from Janyl are featured in Kyrgyz Epic Theatre in New York: Photographs by Margaret Morton published by the University of Central Asia in 2008.

In 2008 Virlana created Er Toshtuk based on one of the oldest Kyrgyz epics about a magical and darkly humorous journey into the underworld.

Their translations used in Yara productions were published in 2008 as a bilingual anthology In a Different Light.

Together they have received the Agni Translation Prize, numerous NYSCA translation grants and The National Theatre Translation Fund Award for their work on the verse drama Forest Song.

Tkacz and Phipps have also devoted themselves to translating traditional material including: folk tales, songs, incantations and epics.

Ihe show performed at La MaMa in 2009 and continues to perform in Kyrgyzstan.

Backstage called it "a small gem," "full of humor and terrific physicality."

"Opera GAZ" she created with Nova Opera from Kyiv performed at La MaMa in New York in December 2019 and was called "brilliant," "one of the most searing modern operas" and "a must see."