Organic Streetscape Projekt hammers it home

I'm going to go off on a couple of tangents here that I don't intend to hit very often in the context of this blog. But the show today brought back a lot of great memories for me. To set the context a bit, this was an art show with the stated goal of taking Ukrainian-Canadian, Ukrainian, Serbian and Canadian culture, tossing in some gypsy and folk spicing and shaking it all up together to see if anything decent can come of it.

In short, my answer is duh! Of course. If you can listen to this style of music without wanting to dance yourself into a primitive oblivion then you are a cold stone indeed. I have some criticism that I will express shortly, but I want to say first, very emphatically indeed, that my overall take was extremely positive and that I am very glad that I came and I have to say that anyone who failed to come missed an event that does not happen every day or even every 100 days.

The young lads involved, Ludy Dobri a band of mostly musicians from Ukraine plus one guy from Canada (but of a Ukrainian background), and Worldly Savages, started by a guy who is not (corrected Dec 23/10) originally from Serbia, provided the main attraction/entertainment of the evening. Their style of music takes some traditional slavic tunes, speeds them up, mixes in some eastern influences and even some vaguely ska-ish beats and comes up with something that I suppose could be compared to klezmer, though that would not be entirely accurate.

The setting was the Snowball Gallery on Queen Street just east of Roncesvalles Avenue and the walls were festooned with art by a number of young Canadian and Ukrainian artists and included one particularly interesting piece which was in fact a collage of many separate drawings created by random people in the street who were asked to commit to paper via words or drawings what the concept of a "Ukrainian Toronto" evoked in their minds. My favourite was done by a guy who is married to a Ukrainian, but who is not Ukrainian himself. His drawing managed to at one and the same time deliver a very stereotypically visual presentation with some very nuanced content that only someone who is married to a Ukrainian could possibly know.

The best art piece in my opinion was a video installation featuring a young woman singing in a traditional villager style, but mixed in a club style. And this is where I shall begin to digress into my critique which isn't really a critique at all but just some observations.

The theme of the evening as presented by the MC was that Ukrainian-Canadian culture (serving as a proxy here for any hyphenated identity brought in from the old world) can be stifling and is often dictated by the "keepers" of the culture who are more likely than not, more traditional than the people in the countries they left behind. I must say that I pretty well agree with this sentiment.

She then continued on to say that these particular young men are lashing out against this heinous oppression and proceeded to read a letter written by an anonymous "figurehead" of the Ukrainian-Canadian community who, while recognizing the talent of the group and giving them some due merit, nonetheless was appalled by their apparent partaking of the pleasures of life. Yeah, the letter writer is a douchebag. And one day, when these guys get jobs and tire of what they are doing now, the same person will wonder why the youth are so apathetic.

This brought me back some 15 years when I was in a sense part of a previous iteration of cultural iconoclasts who wanted to shake the tree of what we were brought up with and see what fell out. We also received a similar letter or two, even though what we were doing was not in our opinion all too controversial. There are always haters out there who just don't get young people, creative people, or people who want to have fun. Despite the controversy then, I still have people now who remind me of our creative work and ask if I have any plans to revive it. My answer is always a very firm "probably not".

All I want to say to these young men (and women as there were many women represented amongst the artists) is that there are more people out there who appreciate what they are doing, than there are jerks who don't. They probably know it, and are probably using the "antagonism" as a catalyst for creativity, which is great.

But, and perhaps they don't quite realize this themselves, they are a product of their upbringing / environment. The speeches reminded me of a Ukrainian wedding, where everyone and his drunken uncle gets up to read a letter from the "old-country". And the music, though fresh, ragged, intense, nonetheless tugged at the deepest roots of those ingrained lessons we learned. I had to physically stop myself from jumping onto the dance floor and kicking a few steps of the hopak. I'm certain I was not the only one there who felt that way. One particularly fun-loving couple that looked like they were in their late 40s-early 50s actually did dance a little bit off to one side. Though those people should rightly have been the object of the scorn of the youngsters putting on the show, they weren't, simply because they were letting loose in their own way, which I think in the end was the whole point.

So this is my way of saying, I am very happy to see young people embrace their identities whatever they may be and even in the process of throwing off those parts that stifle rather than enrich the identity, nonetheless manage to add to the culture, grow it, keep it alive and constantly move in a new, yet strangely, and very comfortingly familiar direction.

A final note, and as a forty something male, I have noted this in ever expanding spheres of life, the young ladies are putting their male peers to shame. The boys are great musicians, they played with a ferocious, creative energy that envigorated everyone in the room. But their controversy appears to revolve around the fact that someone doesn't think smoking pot and then picking up instruments is a great idea.

The women on the other hand presented works of art that really dug deep into the psyche of the Ukrainian-Canadian identity. Some works cut jagged lacerations across the very beliefs that those young women's parents, grandparents, great-grandparents held close to their hearts. Some works pushed traditional culture to edges that have not been crossed before as far as I know. And yet I did not feel in the least that the artists were rejecting the culture they grew up in, they were simply expressing publicly the fact that they are not and cannot be some sort of mummified exemplars of an ideal their predecessors imagined. The countries their forebears came from are truly "imagined countries" a phrase that several previous generations of Ukrainian-Canadian writers, thinkers and artists have aptly applied to that golden city that was the Ukraine of their parents' dreams.

So you ask, where is the criticism? Well, and this may not be entirely fair, but Ludy Dobri seems to suffer from the same curse that every band worth listening to that has ever come out of either Ukraine or the Ukrainian diaspora suffers from. Namely, they rock 100x more powerfully live than on CD. Komy Vnyz, Braty Hadiukyny, VV, Mandry, The Ukrainians, Taras Chubay (even Ron Cahute for pete's sake, though please don't kill me for putting him in with the rest of the aforementioned bands) all have blown me away at concerts, but their CDs seem only a pale simulacrum of the real thing. The only exception to this rule seems to be the band Okean Elzy who have decent recorded music, but suck on stage.

Anyway, you will have several more chances to see Ludy Dobri as well as Worldly Savages both at the upcoming Bloor Street West Ukrainian Festival, as well as other venues around Toronto and the rest of Canada. I highly recommend that you take the time to go see them. These guys know how to have fun, and if you begrudge them this indulgence, you are an old fogey. They are also "doing" something. They didn't just sit around the bong and laugh at how stupid their father is, they went and organized a pretty impressive art evening... well, okay, their girlfriends did all the heavy lifting on the organizational side, but still, they inspired their girlfriends to make this project a reality. And they drew a much bigger crowd than I have often seen at events that the older generation puts together.

Key to images:

1. Ludy Dobri; 2. Playing the Hammered Dulcimer; 3. The lead dude from Worldly Savages; 4. Part of the rather large crowd, and boy was it hot in there! I should have figured an art gallery on Queen West wasn't going to feature A/C.