Kurbasy

Tickets cost $28 and $49 (including service charges). They are also available by phone through Hold My Ticket at 505-886-1251.

Kurbasy will be here as 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.

Kurbasy was here in 2018 for a fun residency that included shows at Outpost and Paradiso, our first foreign language folk singing workshop, and a workshop at UNM. We look forward to their return visit!

Kurbasy is an avant-garde 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 across Europe—from the front lines of occupied Eastern Ukraine to concert halls in Western Europe and USA. The ambient approach of Kurbasy gives life to the indigenous polyphonic sounds of Ukraine's rich traditional music heritage. Led by vocalists, Kurbasy is now experimenting with the sounds of Ukrainian instruments—traditional dulcimer, winds and percussions together with Tibetan singing bowls, violin and double bass. The theatrical background of the group is a core component of Kurbasy's aesthetic. The music they perform is tied to, celebrates, and renews the rituals and the lived memories of Ukraine and her people.

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 U.S., 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 wartime 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.