#ukrainian-folklore

#ukrainian-folklore

At the Hamburger Bahnhof, the props, costumes, and set pieces of the musical are staged in vignettes throughout a large hall: a life-sized horse sculpture in a pink clearing surrounded by dirt, a curtained cart set up as a stage with a figure on its steps, two life-sized human figures in animal masks perched in a high window, as if observing the events.

The Irish government will give 2,000 artists unrestricted weekly stipends in a program officials described as a "recognition, at government level, of the important role of the arts in Irish society." After a successful three-year pilot, the Irish government made its basic income program for artists permanent. Similar pilots have been launched here in the United States, but they're supported primarily by the nonprofit sector.

Their gathering still had to be dispersed, but the enthusiasm that Ored Recordings inspires even among enforcers of the law speaks volumes about the power of what Khalilov and his friend and label co-founder Timur Kodzoko call punk ethnography: the recording of religious chants, laments and displacement songs at family gatherings, local festivals, in people's kitchens, to fight against the erasure of Circassian culture.

Her son has put in the request to the volunteer humanitarian team ferrying civilians to safety in the east of the country. But she is caring for her brother, who is paralysed, the woman protests and what about her German shepherd? As explosions boom terrifyingly close, a volunteer patiently explains that his team will carry her brother to the minivan and don't worry, bring the dog.

At the outset of the Kalevala, Finland's national epic, a singer bemoans his separation from a beloved friend who grew up beside him. Today, the friends rarely meet "näillä raukoilla rajoilla, poloisilla Pohjan mailla" - lines which translator Keith Bosley renders "on these poor borders, the luckless lands of the North." The Kalevala, a poetic masterpiece of nearly 23,000 lines, first appeared in 1835. Now, nearly 200 years later, those "luckless lands of the North" are an increasingly tense border zone.