"Earth-Song" Performance

On April 10, Pochayna Event Hall will host an exclusive performance of "EARTH-SONG" (Zemlia-Pisnia) — a musical and theatrical production by the Lviv Academic Municipal Theater, Art Research, and Educational Center "Slovo i Holos" (Word and Voice), featuring and directed by the renowned singer and stage/film actress, Natalia Polovynka. This is a unique performance where the main protagonist is the Ukrainian Song. Song as ancestral memory, a string of pain and joy between heaven and earth, a living force that brings to each of us and the world the skill and strength to preserve Life. The performance is based on Ukraine’s most ancient folk songs. The event is supported by the project Lyudyna Dyvo Svitu (Man is the Miracle of the World).

"How rarely we can hear a living song now! Living—meaning from a living source: from this person in this exact time and space. Because today, a person loves, breathes, and gives birth just as they did a thousand years ago. And the song preserves and revivifies in a human exactly what makes them HUMAN. And it 'comes alive again and laughs again' (Shevchenko)," says director Natalia Polovynka.

The performance will take place on Good Friday — the song will wash over us with silence, a depth of focus, and presence, a memory of the Source of peace and victory. At this time, the performance resonates as a conversation between earth and sky through the singer-actors and through each of us as witnesses — in a space of improvisation, listening, and mutual trust. The song is born here and now before our eyes, like the breath of the earth itself. The boundary between the stage and the audience disappears, creating a single space where love resounds.

Natalia Polovynka on the origins of the performance: "...We have lived and worked with these songs for a long time. At some point, we took a bench and walked through the city with these songs during the Festival of Music, then on Independence Day. It was already a kind of mobile performance. Later, we performed in the rotunda of Ivan Franko Park. This is a subtle game: you watch the song and you watch the world around you. You, the actor, open an ancient song on the stage of the world. The audience approaches, enters, sits nearby, and seemingly measures the distance between the truth of the song and the pop culture of today, between the eternal within themselves — and the tinsel. Thus, the performance-song entered the theater space and lives here. Our Earth is a Song."

Cast: Natalia Polovynka, Yuliia Tarasovych, Mariia Kmit, Khrystyna Silivon, Anastasiia Redchuk.

About the creators:

• Natalia Polovynka is a Ukrainian singer, stage and film actress, educator, and director. Founder of the "Slovo i Holos" Theater Center. Laureate of numerous theater awards and 15 international film festivals in the Best Actress category; Shevchenko National Prize winner.

• "Slovo i Holos" (SiH) is a Lviv Academic Municipal Theater Center—a contemporary theater that manifests Ukraine’s living Tradition through theater and music. Combining education, artistic research, and stage practice, the center works with the human being as a bearer of the Word and the Voice, drawing on the school of classical theater and the ideas of Jerzy Grotowski. The center collaborates with the Grotowski Institute (Wrocław) and European artists, developing theater as a space for knowing and transforming existence.

"EARTH-SONG" is an experience of a living Ukrainian song that enters not just the ears, but the memory, the body, and the depth of inner experience.