Exploring the tragedy of Babi Yar through music and story
Dash Arts' Artistic Director, Josephine Burton, recently wrote an article about our forthcoming production Songs for Babyn Yar for New London Synagogue, for the September edition of their magazine The New Londoner. Here's the printed article in full...
Eighty years ago this month, on Yom Kippur, 34,000 jews were murdered in the suburbs of Kyiv. The city's Jewish community were ordered to pack the belongings they could carry and were marched past the railway station to their deaths in a ravine named Babi Yar.
This location continued to be a site of tragedy throughout the Nazi Occupation of Ukraine. Tens of thousands of others, communist sympathisers, Ukrainians, Roma, homosexuals, even Kyiv Dynamo footballers, were murdered there. Babyn Yar, as it is called by Ukrainians today, became a figurative symbol of hell for the city’s residents. As the Nazis left, they tried to burn their evidence. Later, the Soviets tried to flood the ravine with mud. It was only in the 1970s that the location was formally given what is now a series of memorials for the lives lost there.
Babi Yar remains a great rip in Ukrainian society. Back in 1941, the Nazis deliberately exploited existing tensions between Ukrainian nationalists, Soviet party members and Jewish communities. Unfortunately, tensions still exist today, exacerbated by the present-day Russia- Ukraine conflict, and the ongoing challenges of acknowledging collaboration and antisemitism.
It is into this quagmire, that I, as director, am stepping with some deeply insightful and sensitive colleagues, Yuriy Gurzhy, Svetlana Kundish and Mariana Sadovska this autumn. Each is from a different city in Ukraine, and all now live in Germany. They are ethnically Jewish and Russian Orthodox. Each is an exceptionally talented musician. Between them, they perform in Ukrainian, Russian, English, German, Yiddish and Hebrew.
The four of us, with the addition of our dramaturg Yael Shavit, are creating a music theatre production, Songs for Babyn Yar, which will premiere at JW3 as part of the London Jazz Festival in November.
As a result of Covid restrictions, I haven’t yet worked with them in the room live. But we have experienced two wonderful rehearsal weeks on Zoom, sharing stories, poetry and songs. The three of them have relished finding melodic links between Ukrainian and yiddish folk songs, an early church prayer influenced by chassidic niggun and teaching each other new songs and ways of polyphonic singing. I’ve been working with Yael to tease out a narrative that will encompass this shared joy in each other whilst not shrinking away from the darkness and the horrific tragedy at its heart.
Alongside performing yiddish folk with klezmorim across the world, Svetlana is also the cantor for the Jewish community in Braunschweig. Amongst her congregants is Rachil Blankman, a 93 year old woman who at the age of 13 was put on a train to Siberia from Kyiv Central Station in August 1941 by her father. Rachil’s entire family was killed less than 2 months later. We have been privileged to hear her testimony and her stories of pre-war and post-war life. We skyped her into our rehearsal room. And her voice and her extraordinary grace and zest for life will be a central part of our performance.
It’s not the first time that I have worked with these artists. My charity, Dash Arts, works internationally, creating new artistic work with artists of all artforms - with a mission to bridge divides and challenge the way we see the world.
Aside from Babyn Yar, we’re currently making work with artists from across Europe as part of EUTOPIA - a season of work instigated by the UK Referendum result in 2016, exploring what it means to be European. Before EUTOPIA, we were immersed in a five year journey across the former Soviet Union, searching for an understanding of what it was to live in the Soviet Union and what it is to live within its long shadows.
As part of this work, I saw Mariana perform Chernobyl. The Harvest, a musical tribute to Chernobyl through the songs of the Babushkas that she’d gathered herself, commissioned by and performed with the Kronos Quartet at the Barbican in 2015. It was a performance of beauty and nostalgia that lives on with me today. Captivated by Mariana’s stage presence, I found a way to bring her to London to perform a few years later. And I brought Yuriy to London for the first ever UK performance of his completely brilliant music theatre outfit The Disorientalists - a musical tale of the Jewish writer of the great Caucasian Romeo-and-Juliet style love story, Ali and Nino.
However this autumn, after 18 months of silence, rather than simply presenting the artists on stage, I have the utter privilege of breathing new life into something with them. With Songs for Babyn Yar, we will add our own voices as a memorial and a tribute to the many lives that could not be lived.
Songs for Babyn Yar is taking place at JW3 on Sunday 21 November at 7.30pm, both in-person and as an online live stream. Tickets for the performance are available here.
