Days 11-12

While Sopilka had a dance workshop in the morning, Troyanda explored the Sergei Korolev Space Museum. Sergei (1907-1966) was a spacecraft engineer and lived in Zhytomyr. Part of the museum was in the house he grew up in.

Photo by Jaden Kochan

Photo by Kaitlin Vitt

Later in the day, Troyanda workshopped with the legendary Rafael Malinowsky. We've heard about Rafael since Kristina joined on as Troyanda's artistic director years ago. He's a Polissian genius, and though we couldn't always understand what he was saying (he speaks only Ukrainian), we caught a glimpse into his magical mind.

We learned two dances (a mixed dance and a ladies dance), and the dancers can't stop talking about them. They're fun, they're lively, and they're like nothing we've seen or danced before. I may be biased, but after only a few hours in the workshop, we're already looking pretty good, so I can't imagine how great the dances will look once we work on them more back in our home studio.

The workshops were at the Zhytomyr Ivan Franko State University, which also hosted us for a lovely Ukrainian dinner. After one of the workshops, we met with the administration of the university and took a photo in front of a picture of Metropolitan Ilarion Ohienko, who translated the Bible into Ukrainian. He died in Winnipeg in 1972, where he was buried. 

It was another short stay, but we still got a lot of dancing done before heading to our final destination of Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine.

Photo by Jenn Doroniuk

Phrase of the day

нотаріус (notarius): notary aka someone who deals with legal affairs

Many times throughout the tour as we were driving or walking through cities, I'd hear dancers say "Did you guys see that Hot Topic? Well, it wasn't Hot Topic." I did not know at all what they were talking about until finally one day someone pointed out the sign(s) they were referring to -- "Нотаріус," which I guess if you can't read Cyrillic (the alphabet the Ukrainian language uses), you may think you keep seeing many potential misspelled knock-offs of Hot Topic, the American chain featuring pop culture and music-inspired fashion.

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