The Power of Dance: P. Virsky Ukrainian National Folk Dance Ensemble
P. Virsky Ukrainian National Folk Dance Ensemble. Performance in Donetsk. 30 April 2006. Wikimedia Commons.
On 24 February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. One year later, there is no end to the fighting in sight. There are moments when music and dance can express more than words. To get a sense of the Ukrainian spirit, watch this rare rehearsal video of the P. Virsky Ukrainian National Folk Dance Ensemble. Rehearsal videos reduce the dance to its essence: there are no costumes, no stage, no audience, just movement, music, and the relaxed, supportive camaraderie between the dancers.
The ensemble continues to perform in Ukraine: it is now preparing for its big spring concert performance in Kyiv on 24 March 2023. While Ukraine is fighting for its existence against Putin’s Russia, artists like the dancers of the Virsky Ensemble become a part of the national struggle, because their dances offer their audiences a powerful sense of cultural community.
The roots of the Virsky Ensemble go back to Soviet times when both Ukraine and Russia were part of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union consisted of 15 Soviet Socialist Republics, but Russia dominated all the other republics. It was a dictatorship run by the Communist Party. There was very strict censorship, but also a lot of support for the arts, because the regime realized how important art was for creating a sense of identity and for passing on the state’s propaganda to ordinary people. The P. Virsky Ukrainian National Folk Dance Ensemble was founded in 1937, a time when folk dance was incredibly popular in the Soviet Union.
Pavlo Virsky (1905-1975), stamp. Wikimedia Commons (Vasily Vasilenko).
Pavlo Virsky, the ensemble’s founder, was himself quite a remarkable man. He was born into an aristocratic family in 1905 in the famous Ukrainian black-sea port of Odessa, back then a part of the Russian empire. After the Russian revolution in 1917, Pavlo and his family were close to starvation. The men of the family would take ropes down to the sea to wet them in the seawater. Once the ropes had dried, they would extract the sea salt and sell it so that they could buy some food.
Pavlo only started dancing at 18, after he had already finished school, but the determined boy even made it to the fabled dance academy of the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow: after the revolution, there were special classes accommodating late starters like Virsky. After his studies, he returned to Ukraine and soon occupied leading positions as choreographer in Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk and Kyiv. Virsky led the Folk Dance Ensemble until his death in 1975. His strictness was legendary, but the dancers forgave him his temperament because he was just as strict with himself: when a dancer couldn’t manage a combination, Virsky himself would demonstrate how to do it, performing difficult jumps even after his fourth heart attack.