Associate composer Anna Pidgorna is turning to Ukraine’s ancient lamentation tradition to grieve the losses of war in a ritualized performance blending folk singing, theatre and contemporary concert music. “Lamenting for Ukraine” — taking places on April 28 at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts in Burnaby — combines solo and ensemble laments created by members of the Ukrainian community with works for violin and piano by Kaija Saariaho, Arvo Pärt, Jocelyn Morlock, Yevhen Stankovych and Anna herself. Over the last few months Anna has been gathering a small group of women — some recent refugees, some settled immigrants — at the Eighth & Eight Creative Spaces and CMC BC’s Murray Adaskin Salon to learn Ukraine’s lamentation tradition, known as gholosinnia, and create new laments to process each participant’s experience of russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.
One of the participants, Anna Shylova-Kolomiets, spent the first few weeks of the war in Kyiv trying to shield her three children from russia’s missile attacks, fighter jets rocking the house she built with her husband less than a year before war threatened to claim it. First fleeing to Europe, the family ended up in Greater Vancouver in the spring of 2023. Living in Richmond, she is occasionally triggered by the airplanes flying in and out of the airport, and grappling with the challenges of building a life in a foreign country while watching her homeland getting pummeled by russian forces.
Another participant, Masha Birkby, arrived in Canada as a teen in the 1990s, her family fleeing the chaos of Ukraine’s early years of independence following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Having worked in theatre production for over two decades, Masha was particularly traumatized by Russia’s bombing of the drama theatre in Mariupol in March 2022. The attack killed an estimated 600 people sheltering in the theatre’s basement. Managing a theatre of the same size in Richmond at the time of the attack, Masha could not help seeing the catastrophe all around her as she went about her job. Her lament is an attempt to process these emotional wounds.
Like Masha, Anna Pidgorna also left Ukraine as a child in the 1990s. Her lament mourns the loss of her family’s dacha, a summer house across the river from the city of Kherson, which was flooded by over 20 feet of water when the russian forces blew up sections of the Kakhovka Dam in the summer of 2023. The dacha preserved several generations of childhood memories for Anna’s extended family. The marshy land it sat on is now a no man’s land between the two armies. Anna also composed two ensemble laments based on texts by all the lamentation participants.
Anna Pidgorna_photo by Anya Chibis
To bring the audience out of the darkness of grief, Anna curated a program of contemporary violin and piano duos which explore the themes of journeying from darkness to light, of quenching thirst after a long drought, of persevering through struggle. These works will be performed by local violinist Jack Campbell and Ukrainian pianist Anna Sagalova, who was forced to flee her native city Kharkiv due to russia’s indiscriminate bombing. Since arriving in Vancouver in the summer of 2022, Anna Sagalova has been teaching piano lessons, and performing recitals and fundraising concerts around BC, Ontario and the Maritimes.
“Lamenting for Ukraine” takes place at 7:00 pm on Sunday, April 28 at the Studio Theatre at Shadbolt Centre for the Arts. Tickets are free and available on the day of the performance from the Shadbolt Centre box office. The event is produced by Anna Pidgorna’s Pickle Underground and presented by Connect Fest Burnaby in partnership with United Way and CMC BC. Learn more on Facebook or Shadbolt Centre’s box office.