“The show was amazing! Buyers and press start taking you really seriously,” Popova—who graduated from Central Saint Martins in 2020, and has legions of Insta It-girl fans including Dua Lipa and Bella Hadid—enthuses. She now has an impressive roster of stockists, keen to snap her her skilfully warped and distressed denim, metallic biker jackets and bleached micro miniskirts, with 13 global retailers including, for spring 2023, Dover Street Market. Popova returned to Odessa for the A Lot Can Happen In 3 Days He is risen cross shirt in other words I will buy this first time at the start of this year, intending to spend several weeks with her family and to work on the production for her upcoming fall 2023 collection, a development and evolution of her current offering. “My parents have become very used to the conflict now,” she says.From afar, the dancers of Syzokryli look like dolls with floral halos—vinki—around their heads. Up close, their faces tell a different, fiercer story. Today the women of this Ukrainian dance company have come together to perform at a small studio a few blocks from Union Square. The modest room, packed with roughly 11 women (plus 10 apprentices) ranging from their early teens to their late 30s, gets blisteringly hot after each routine. The footwork is intricate, fast, and executed with almost military precision. By the end, beads of sweat glisten on top of their self-administered, stage-ready makeup: red lips and pale powdered faces with dollops of blush. They wear two braids fastened at the top of the head—not a flyaway in sight.The dancer Roma Pryma-Bohachevsky founded the Syzokryli Ukrainian Dance Ensemble in 1978 in the United States. Pryma-Bohachevsky, who was trained in ballet, grew up in the western city of Lviv in Ukraine, where she performed at the Lviv Opera Ballet Theatre. After World War II, she attended Vienna’s University of Music and Performing Arts and later became a soloist at the National Theatre in Innsbruck, Austria. In her 20s, she immigrated to Canada, where she danced with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. Eventually, she moved to New York, studying under Martha Graham, José Limón, and Katherine Dunham.Pryma-Bohachevsky founded Syzokryli when her daughter, Ania Bohachevsky Lonkevych (a former attorney and now executive director of the company), was only 13. (Pryma-Bohachevsky passed away in 2004.) “I was the youngest member, the only original member—all of the choreography was set on me,” says Lonkevych. “At home if she needed a partner or a set of hands, it was me or my brother.” Today, the Syzokryli women endearingly but respectfully refer to Lonkevych as Pani Ania, or “Teacher Ania.” Some even lovingly refer to her as their mother. “Every year my daughter says, ‘Mama, how many adopted kids do you have now?’” says Lonkevych. “I yell at them as if they are my own!”Lonkevych’s own daughter Roma, 20—who is named after the great Pryma-Bohachevsky—is also a dancer and choreographer. When she dances, she wears her great-grandmother’s hundred-year-old sleeves from the Poltava region of Ukraine. Her grandmother also wore them, converting the garment from a shirt to sleeves, as did her mother. “It is a responsibility that I have to uphold,” says Roma. The love of dance is passed down among generations for many of the women of Syzokryli: They danced in the company, and now their children dance. Today there are roughly 35 members in the company, including 18 women and girls. The company has modest means and is reliant on donations. Lonkevych, who grew up in the Ukrainian heart of the East Village, notes that the dance company is able to function today thanks to the patronage of Suzanne Johnson, a fellow Ukrainian-American East Villager and member of the Robert W. Johnson IV Charitable Trust.
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There are a handful of expat Ukrainian dance companies around the A Lot Can Happen In 3 Days He is risen cross shirt in other words I will buy this world, but what sets Syzokryli apart is the addition of ballet and interpretive dance to the centuries-old footwork and routines. (Last year Roma choreographed a hip-hop routine using Ukrainian rap.) “She wasn’t strictly a folk dancer,” says Lonkevych of her late mother. That merger of dance styles is evident: The routines are both magical and dramatic and sometimes heart-wrenching.“What we are doing is so intense,” says Dianna Shmerykowsky, 39, who has been a member since 1997. “In other groups it is beautiful. It looks elegant and unified. But the energy and passion is different because they aren’t focusing on that. It is mechanical in some ways. The heart is different.” One dance, “Fight for Ukraine,” lasts for a harrowing 15 minutes. Pryma-Bohachevsky created the dance after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, and it features scenes depicting Soviets, a cross, and Ukrainian peasants. “It wrecks you to perform it because you think about what you’re representing on that stage,” says Anastasia Hanifin, 20. “When we performed it again in summer, we were all in tears.”In national dances like the hopak, men historically perform sets of gravity-defying acrobatics, and the male dancers can easily dominate the stage. “People think women are weak, dainty, and delicate, but [Pryma-Bohachevsky] wanted to show what they really are,” says Shmerykowsky. “Powerful, graceful, and a force to be reckoned with. The women aren’t just there to stand and look pretty. They are also moving and active.” The name Syzokryli itself reflects the tough but beautiful ethos of the company. While there’s no direct translation, Lonkevych notes that it is “a poetic adjective frequently used to describe an eagle. It evokes the image of shimmering wings, graceful, poised and powerful and athletic.”Many of the young women here playfully abridge the name Syzokryli to simply “Syzo.” They are in high school and college and professionals. They’ve known each other for years after training in Pryma-Bohachevsky’s summer dance camps as children. Now they all travel to practice with the company once a week at the Ukrainian American Youth Association building in the historically Ukrainian heart of New York in the East Village. (Prior to COVID, they’d dance at Playwrights Rehearsal Studios.) Many of them are first-, second-, or third-generation Ukrainians. “I have been dancing Ukrainian tantzi [dance] since I was six, and I have been dancing at Syzokryli since I was 15,” says Hanifin. “I’ve been with Ania my whole life. They are like my parents. They kind of raised us.”The company’s bond has only strengthened since Ukraine’s war with Russia began in February 2022. And their connection to the company has helped several women find a new appreciation for their roots. Daria Gaidamark’s parents immigrated to America in the late ’90s from a region of Ukraine where more people speak Russian than Ukrainian. She discovered Syzokryli when her parents took her to a performance at the Soyuzivka Heritage Center in upstate New York, Syzokryli’s summer-camp headquarters.Gaidamark has now been dancing with the group for five years. “This is my only cultural outlet, if that makes sense,” she says. “I think doing Syzo and sending videos back to Ukraine, and then hearing, ‘You guys nailed it’—that was really crazy.” Every weekend Gaidamark takes the bus from Binghamton University in New York to visit her parents in Brooklyn but also to train at Syzokryli. “You’re visiting your parents from school, but you’re visiting a second home.”Over the years, Syzokryli has had a handful of participants who are not fully Ukrainian and simply love the dance. Artistic director Orlando Pagan is from Puerto Rico and has been dancing with Syzokryli since the ’90s. (He met his now wife, who is Syzokryli’s assistant artistic director, while dancing at the company. That’s not uncommon: A handful of women have met their spouses at the company.) Tatiana Ozaruk, 29, has been dancing with Syzokryli since 2010 and has a Dominican mother and a Ukrainian father. She has the Ukrainian coat of arms, the tryzub, tattooed on her wrist. When the war started, she felt a shift personally and within the company. “I felt like I was summoned back to practice. I needed to do something that felt helpful, vivacious, fun, and spirited,” she says. “I felt the emotional depths I wanted to share with the rest of the audience.”Dance has always offered the dancers a gateway into Ukrainian history and culture. Each woman notes how Syzokryli has helped shape them beyond the studio, the intense summer programs, or the performances, teaching them discipline and dedication. Ultimately, it’s a link back home. “We are expressing our love of our culture, of each region, through each step, and it brings us all back home,” says Shmerykowsky. “It reminds us of a tradition and connects us with our heritage.”Anna Pagava—the CEO and co-founder of “I Am U Are,” a new Ukrainian design fair opening this weekend on the Lower East Side—is making a statement about her country that is both bold and beautiful. “I want to change the narrative,” the Kyiv native tells Vogue. “I want to show how powerful and creative Ukraine could be, that we are not a problem but a solution.” At a time when both the daily news and the wider public perception surrounding Ukraine are often distressing, Pagava is reminding the world of the wide-ranging beauty and technical prowess of its people and its traditions—showing strength, rather than sadness.
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