Yes, Tak - Between one revolution and another

SWAY Collective is a network of artists, musicians, composers, playwrights, actors and theatre professionals who collaborate on interdisciplinary dramatic performances. Their next performance, Yes, Tak will take place on April 24, 25 and 26 in Kingston, ON.

About the play
Christina Bodnar, a Ukrainian Canadian grad student, goes to Ukraine in 2007 to teach ESL. Discovering that post-Orange Revolution Ukraine is the not the “old country” of her cultural classes, she encounters a youth culture at once hopeful of a democratic future and deflated by recent revolutionary failures. Incorporating experimental choral arrangements, choreography, and media art, this interdisciplinary performance dramatises Christina’s navigation of cultural differences, folkloric grief, and budding relationships in a fractured Ukraine.

Notes from the playwright:
The performance will feature the lives of young Ukrainians after the failure of the Orange Revolution – a nationwide movement towards electoral and democratic reforms between 2004 and 2005. Many university-aged students participated in the mass demonstrations and civil disobedience constituting the non-violent revolution. Set in 2007, Yes, Tak represents Ukrainian students who were in despair about the potential of improving their lives democratically, deflated by the seeming futility of their own revolutionary actions. Yet at the same time, these students also maintain a curious sense of resilience, derived from national tradition and folklore. In Yes, Tak, we engage their experiences through Christina’s own discoveries of the relationship between language, history, and Ukrainian identity, while she teases out the complexities of a socially and politically splintered Ukraine after the end of the Orange Revolution.

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