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ON SUNDAY MORNING

Maisternia Pisni (Lviv, Ukraine) 

 

Directed by: Sergey Kovalevich

Performed by: Natalka Polovynka (music director), Ulyana Horbachevska, Olena Kostyuk 


Sunday, morning… a moment of existence when consciousness awakes, early morning, the Sun has just risen, the time of doing nothing, the time of the presence of Time.

Sunday – non-action, holiday. Inactive existence, blessed and sanctified with Eternity. 

Ritual always interlinks with time. Songs from the annual ritual cycle of young Ukrainian women, on which the performance is based, have arrived from the memories of our bodies. They did not ask whether we want to sing them, if we understand their unpretentious simplicity, or if we have any right to undertake this holy singing. After all, we left the places where these songs were born. Nevertheless, it is possible that we are amongst the last people able to receive this knowledge coming from the depths of centuries, from the depths of Time Itself. Nowadays these songs do not have pragmatic meaning – at the most they can help us to live. It is possible that they are the pain of the Earth, or even the Earth Itself, which follows us. 

There is no narrative plot in the performance. It is a History of Time of the Tree of Songs. The theme of the girl has been unchanged for centuries: She sits and waits, and He travels, on the move throughout his life. On Sunday morning it snows. And the story goes: On Sunday morning… she was standing on a footbridge…  

Within the framework of the Rasa project, supported by the Grotowski Institute, Maisternia Pisni works on music and movement stemming from Ukrainian women’s rituals, as well as from seasonal rituals, paying special attention to the role of women. The chosen songs, originating from various regions of Ukraine, especially Vinnytsia, Poltava and Polesie, are analysed by the members of Maisternia from the perspective of ritual, and they search for ritual elements in and through the songs. The next step is an attempt to find an adequate form for this research in the theatre. This phase of work is the search for elements of ritual in stage actions. 

 

Duration: 90 minutes