Kurbasy Program

Table of Contents

Event Details
Acknowledgement of Land
The Program
Song List
The Artists
National and Regional Ukraine
Center Stage

Acknowledgement of Land

The Penn State University campuses are located on the original homelands of the Erie; Haudenosaunee (Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk, Seneca, and Tuscarora); Lenape (Delaware Nation, Delaware Tribe, and Stockbridge-Munsee); Shawnee (Absentee, Eastern, and Oklahoma); Susquehannock; and Wahzhazhe (Osage) Nations.

As a land grant institution, we acknowledge and honor the traditional caretakers of these lands and strive to understand and model their responsible stewardship. We also acknowledge the longer history of these lands and our place in that history.

Written by PSU Educational Equity in collaboration with the Indigenous Peoples Student Association and the Indigenous Faculty and Staff Alliance

Why do we make an acknowledgement?

The Center for the Performing Arts at Penn State gathers people together to foster communities, learn from our unique differences, and participate in civic engagement through the arts. We leverage the act of acknowledging the land to spark curiosity and conversation about our nation’s past, present, and future. This ongoing process can change our learning and healing journey as individuals and as a nation, and it is not meant to be resolved. We are not checking a box; we are living in the questions and the possibilities.

Visit Land Acknowledgment for more information.

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Songs of the Ukrainian Forest is a conversation between two actress-singers, longtime colleagues and friends Natalia Rybka-Parkhomenko and Maria Oneshchak. The program took shape in the spring of 2020 during the global pandemic quarantine in one of the forests of Lviv region in western Ukraine, where the two women and their families took refuge together.

Since Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Mariia and Nataliia have performed versions of the work in Ukraine and in Europe as a duo, self-accompanied with hand percussion, Tibetan cymbals and bells, and a shruti box – a small Indian harmonium. With these performances in the United States, Kurbasy is realizing the opportunity to fully produce this work visually and musically.

The program begins with spring songs — calls to awaken and renew life after the long winter — and includes ballads and love songs from Polissia, Bukovina, Poltava, Podillia, and Central Ukraine. Traditional recruit songs are sung, which highlight the war time situation in Ukraine today.

An affirmation in a time of war and resistance Kurbasy’s Songs of the Ukrainian Forest reveals contemporary connections to an archaic past.

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“Zamovliannia Vesny” (“Spring Invocation”)

A spring song (vesnyanka) from Podillia. Traditionally, spring songs were sung only by girls, very loudly, in the open air, urging nature to awake after winter, and to welcome longer, warmer days and new life.

“Pytalasia Nenka Dochky” (“A Mother Asked Her Daughter”)

Spring song

“Rozlylysia Vody na Chotyry Brody” (“The Waters Flow into Four Fords”)

Spring song

“Ya Ptychka-Nevelychka” (“I Am a Little Birdy”)

This lyrical chant from the Kyiv region is a secular song for a three-part ensemble or choir, which was popular in Ukraine in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. A song about love, where a small bird and a falcon allegorically depict lovers figuring out their relationship.

“A Vzhe Tomu Sim Lit Bude” (“It Has Been Seven Years”)

A ballad from Bukovina about a Ukrainian soldier who has been wandering lost in the forest for seven years and now talks to his mother, who visits him in the shape of a bird and flies off, for she could no longer wait for her son to return from military service.

“Oi, Shcho Zh to Za Svit Nastav” (“Oh, What a World it is Now”)

A ballad with a sad story about how a son drove his mother out of the house, after which many sorrows and troubles had fallen on him and his family. 

“Chyia to Dolyna” (“Whose Valley Is This”)

A lyrical song about a love triangle — a girl in love with a Cossack who has a wife and three children

“Kolyskovi” (“Lullabies”)

Two Ukrainian lullabies accompanied by Tibetan bells and “four elements of Koshi” chimes

“Bilia Richky, Bilia Brodu” (“By the River, By the Ford”)

A Lemki song about a cheating girl

“Oi, Vershe, Miy Vershe” (“O Highlands, My Highlands”)

One of the most famous Lemko songs recounts thoughts of a girl who regrets that she left her mother and fell in love with a boy with black eyebrows.

“V Nediliu Rano” (“Early on Sunday”)

Lemko song about both sweet and bitter sides of young love and betrayal.

“Iz-za Hory Viter Viie” (“The Wind Blows from the Mountain”)

A spring song from the Poltava region in central Ukraine. With these songs, in ancient times, girls tried to invoke spring and awaken nature. But they also have lyrical plots, as in this song, where a woman with two children waits for her husband for a long time.

“Oi, Lisu, Lisu” / “Oi, Perepelychko” / “Rano-Rano” (“O Forest” / “O Little Quail” / “Bright and Early”)

A medley of three songs begins with a spring invocation (“O Forest”) and moves to “O Little Quail” (another version of “I Am a Little Birdy,” popular in the eighteenth century). “Bright and Early” is a relic of pre-Christian cosmology and ritual, “Seeing off the Rusalky,” whose timing is now linked to the Christian calendar. The week before Pentecost or “Trinity,” the spirits of departed kin temporarily cross the veil between worlds. Locals still honor them with reverence by setting tables, offering food, singing to appease, and finally escorting them ritually into the deep forest — a symbolic return to the other world. It’s a sacred act of balance: welcoming the dead, then gently sending them back so the living may thrive undisturbed and cosmic order restored.

“Zberimosia Rode” (“Let’s Get Together, Kindred”)

Feast song from Podlachia borderland region about unity and the value of going through even the most difficult moments in life together.

“Chevrona Kalyna” (“Red Guelder Rose”)

This military recruit song from Podillia region describes the burden of a wife whose husband goes off to war. Not only she, but all young girls, families, and entire villages are crying for their loved ones.

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KURBASY is a contemporary musical project of the renowned progressive Les Kurbas Theatre in Lviv, Ukraine. Founded in 2008 as an informal vocal gathering of singer-actresses, the group has performed from the front lines of occupied Eastern Ukraine to concert halls in Western Europe and in the United States.

The idea of culture as a cosmic living organism is central to Kurbasy, whose folk-based multimedia performances conjure the natural world, beliefs, and rituals. The theatrical foundation of the group is central to Kurbasy’s aesthetic. The music the artists perform perform is tied to, celebrates, and renews the rituals and the lived memories of Ukraine and its people.

Led by actor-vocalists Mariia Oneshchak and Nataliia Rybka-Parkhomenko, Kurbasy’s performances trace a theatrical arc to reveal the stories held in the songs of their rich repertoire. The collection can be heard on Raytse (2009), a title that references both paradise and the mythical egg at the origins of the universe. Songs from the calendar cycle, Kupala [St. John’s Day/Midsummers] and wedding-ritual songs form the core of their second album, Miracle of Creation, released in 2018.

Many of the winter songs from Kurbasy’s release Rozkolyada (2021), aside from describing biblical and archaic Carpathian Christmas tales, are also rich in early Slavonic mythopoetic symbols and animalistic ritual images.

Kurbasy is part of Center Stage, a public diplomacy initiative of the U. S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs with funding provided by the U. S. Government, administered by the New England Foundation for the Arts in cooperation with the U. S. Regional Arts Organizations. General management is provided by Lisa Booth Management, Inc. www.CenterStageUS.org.

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Ukraine sits at the heart of Europe, bordered to the southwest by Moldova and Romania, to the west by Slovakia and Poland, to the northwest by Belarus, and to the northeast and east by Russia. Ukraine’s diverse geography — from the densely wooded Carpathian Mountains to the Dnipro River basin and seaside of Odessa — have informed the many and different rites, practices, and traditions that together form Ukrainian culture.

POLISSIA is Ukraine’s most archaic cultural region. Sheltered by dense forests and vast marshlands, and historically insulated from major geopolitical upheavals, Polissia has preserved archaic songs, rituals, and cosmological beliefs dating back to Kyivan Rus’ and even pre-Christian times. Remarkably, recent genetic studies pinpoint this borderland between Ukraine and Belarus as the cradle of the distinct Slavic genotype. Millennia ago, Slavic DNA diverged from Baltic lineages, seeding the entire future Slavic gene pool.

BUKOVINA is a cultural crossroads historically divided between Romania, Ukraine, and Austria-Hungary, whose legacy still lingers in architecture, law, and layered identities. Nestled in the Carpathians, its culture bursts with chromatic intensity — embroidered sleeves like woven rainbows, wooden churches piercing misty ridges, and music so intricate it feels like alchemy. Bukovina was and remains a region of striking diversity. Its vibrant highland culture features some of Ukraine’s most ornate folk dress and complex instrumental music. Rooted in ancient Carpathian Slavic traditions, the local sound absorbed strong Ottoman and Balkan influences heard in asymmetric rhythms, modal scales, and instruments like the cimbalom and trembita. Despite shifting borders and empires, Bukovina’s musical heritage endures as a unique fusion that is archaic, layered, and unmistakably its own.

POLTAVA oblast (region) is situated in central Ukraine on the left bank of the Dnipro. Historically and culturally part of the Cossack Hetmanate, the region is agriculturally significant and a center of Ukraine’s oil and natural gas industry. Poltava is the beating heart of Cossack spirit and the cradle of Ukrainian identity along the river Dnipro’s banks. Here, where steppes meet rolling hills, the legacy of the Zaporozhian Host lives in speech, songs, and stubborn pride. Refined by luminaries like Ivan Kotliarevsky and later Taras Shevchenko, who wove its rhythms into the nation’s poetic canon, the Poltava dialect, with its melodic intonations and archaic lexical treasures, became the bedrock of modern Ukrainian literary language.

PODILLIA, the sun-drenched southern heartland of Ukraine, is a cultural borderland where Ukrainian traditions blend with strong Moldovan and Bulgarian influences — legacies of migration, trade, and imperial border shifts. Known for its vibrant folk embroidery, archaic singing, and earthy, rhythm-driven instrumental music, Podillia absorbed Balkan melodic turns, Romanian dance motifs, and even Bulgarian vocal harmonies — especially in villages settled by nineteenth-century Bulgarian migrants. Unique rituals like vesnianky (spring songs) and kupalo fire-jumping survives here with a distinct local flavor. Architecture, cuisine, and dialects also reflect this mosaic: clay houses with carved eaves, spicy stews with Balkan flair, and linguistic borrowings that color everyday speech.

CENTRAL UKRAINE, flanking the left and right banks of the Dnipro River and its basin, consists of several provinces (including Poltava), and its cities are among the oldest in the country. Extensive grain and sunflower fields are found throughout the area. Regarded as the country’s geographic heartland, it holds a resonant archive of polyphonic resistance. Here, the ancient tradition of “chant” singing — rich, layered polyphony echoing Renaissance Europe — survived centuries of imperial erasure, smuggled through generations in village choirs, harvest songs, and whispered lullabies. Though the Russian Empire sought to silence it, today this multi-voiced legacy pulses on, not as museum artifact, but as living proof that authentic voice, like freedom, cannot be fully suppressed — only postponed, then powerfully reclaimed.

LEMKI are a distinct Carpathian highland ethnic group of Rusyn/Ukrainian origin inhabiting Lemkivshchyna, a cultural and historic region that geographically spans the Carpathian Mountains and foothills of western Ukraine, east and north through Slovakia, and Poland. Sharing a rich culture and language across political borders through time, Lemko culture closely holds centuries-old traditions of song, dance, dress, rituals, and unique architecture which are revived and celebrated now throughout Ukraine. Tragically, Lemki became victims of forced resettlement, first by Nazi Germany, then by postwar communist Poland in “Operation Vistula” (1947), which scattered them across western Poland to erase their identity. Many fled or later emigrated — especially to the United States and Canada — where vibrant diaspora communities preserved their language, songs, and churches. Today, their culture survives as a testament to resilience: reviving on native soil and echoing still in exile.

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Kurbasy is traveling the United States as part of Center Stage, a cultural diplomacy program that also produced the group in 2018. The seven-week tour features residencies in eleven communities: Bethlehem, State College, and Lewisburg, Pennsylvania; New York City; Chicago; East Lansing, Michigan; Berkeley and Rohnert Park, California; Salt Lake City; Albuquerque and Santa Fe, New Mexico; and Tucson Arizona.

Since 2012, Center Stage has produced national tours by forty-eight groups from seventeen countries, hosted by colleges and universities, festivals, music clubs, and cultural centers. Center Stage ensembles reach large cities and small towns. The artists engage with communities onstage, offstage, and online through performances, workshops, and discussions, artist-to-artist exchanges, master classes, and community gatherings, and return home to share these experiences with peers and fans. For this last edition of the program, Center Stage has invited alumni groups to return and share their work in communities from coast to coast. These are Khumariyaan (Pakistan), Papermoon Puppet Theatre (Indonesia), Mohamed Abozekry (Egypt and France), and Kurbasy (Ukraine). Visit www.centerstageus.org for more information.

A package of virtual educational materials, tailored to students in upper elementary through high school, provides a better understanding of the contexts in which these artists thrive. Visit https://worldcultureincontext.org/artist/kurbasy-ukraine-folk-songs.

Center Stage is a public diplomacy initiative of the U. S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs with funding provided by the U. S. Government, administered by the New England Foundation for the Arts in cooperation with the U. S. Regional Arts Organizations. General management is provided by Lisa Booth Management, Inc.

Center Stage credits

Producer 

New England Foundation for the Arts
Adrienne Petrillo, Interim Director of Program Strategy
Kelsey Spitalny, Interim Manager of Program Strategy

General Manager

LBMI, Lisa Booth Management, Inc.
Deirdre Valente, principal
Robert W. Henderson Jr., production manager
Danielle Dybiec, Nine Muses Travel, tour advance
Diego Bucio, tour company manager

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