Synthesizing Ukrainian Arts Elements

The differences between the Veryovka Ukrainian National Dance Company and other folkloric companies from former Soviet republics may boil down to a matter of dazzle versus razzle-dazzle.

Asked about the Veryovka’s more famous Moscow counterpart, the Moiseyev, artistic director Anatoly Avdievsky allowed that the Veryovka, on its first U.S. tour in its half-century history, includes plenty of virtuoso elements. But he “prefers and stresses more the fluidity, the elasticity, the flexibility of dance rather than athletics, always drawing a beautiful picture or painting for the audience.”

Avdievsky, 62, was reached by phone in San Francisco, where his 80-member troupe performed last weekend. Veryovka appears tonight through Saturday at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts. He spoke from his hotel through a translator; each response began, “The maestro says . . . .”

The company’s publicity materials characterize Ukrainian music and poetry as “a most luxuriant and fragrant branch on the tree of world folk art.”

Avdievsky elaborated: “The character, the personality of a nation and a people is conveyed to the audience through its dance. As far as tricks and acrobatics, that’s international; it’s similar throughout the world.”

The Veryovka was founded in 1943 by conductor and choral-music specialist Hrihory Veryovka in Kharkov (east of the capital of Kiev), just after the city’s liberation from Nazi invaders. Avdievsky shares Veryovka’s dual expertise and maintains that this alone sets this dance company apart.

“[The Veryovka] is not only very colorful, but because it encompasses three genres of artistic endeavor--vocal, musical and dance--it’s also very diversified,” Avdievsky said. “There have been attempts by other ensembles to use vocal and choral groups, but here the intention is to synthesize the choral with other forms of art.”

The intention is also to synthesize folkloric and classical elements.

“It had always been customary to think of these as two separate forms, two separate movements,” Avdievsky said. “But practice has shown that it’s not true. [Yevgeny] Stankovich, known as the Ukrainian Stravinsky, has written a folk opera using contemporary music as a basis.”

The Cerritos programs include a work titled “The Fern Is Blooming,” based on fragments of that opera and performed by dancers, chorus and orchestra, as well as “Ukrainian Festival Suite,” “Carpathian Cossacks” and a “Hopak” finale for the same combination.

Also on the program are choral works with orchestra; songs for bass voice and orchestra; “Ukrainian Rhapsody,” variations on themes of Liszt and Brahms played on cembellum (similar to a hammer dulcimer) by Vasily Vatamaniuk; and Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumble Bee” played on bayan (Russian accordion) by Pavel Feniuk.

Twenty selections in all will be performed, many using Avdievsky’s own orchestrations or choral arrangements.

If the choral emphasis sets the Veryovka troupe apart, Avdievsky nevertheless hopes that there is at least one quality that his company shares with Moiseyev’s:

“When Moiseyev was asked by a journalist, ‘How would you like to see your [dancers] perform?,’ he said that he would like them to perform as Sviatislav Richter would perform on piano, or [David] Oistrakh on violin--as seamless perfectionists and professionals.

“Richter, by the way, was born in Ukraine, 120 kilometers outside of Kiev, where he was based,” said Avdievsky, only momentarily digressing. “But he never ever toured in Odessa--because the KGB apparently murdered his father there.”

While life has become more difficult in many ways for artists since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the situation also has its bright sides. Avdievsky pointed out, for instance, that the company’s artistic mandate is now very clear.

“Diversity had been drowned out and disappeared in our subservience to a Soviet people,” he said, “A lot of our way of life had become deformed. Now we have to be reborn again. . . .

“Folklore, if you are lucky enough to have the vision of a choreographer, and a ballet master and a choral director,” he said, “you observe, you extract the essence, you take it pure . . . and it comes alive on stage again.

“We are trying to do what is necessary for the soul without diluting it with . . . modernization. Somehow, taking from the past, we look to the future.”

* Veryovka Ukrainian National Dance Company opens tonight at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, 12700 Center Court Drive, Cerritos. 8 p.m. Also Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. $16-$35. (800) 300-4345