Welcome to the 2008 Jewish Music Festival

Mariana Sadowska

Mariana Sadowska appears in...

Composer-Arranger, Musical Dramaturg, Vocalist, Actress, Folklorist, Teacher— Mariana Sadovska has worked all her life in both music and theatre. Born in 1972 in the city of Lviv in Western Ukraine, she was trained as a classical pianist as a young girl at the Lviv Conservatory. In her late teens she joined Lviv’s Les Kurbas Theatre, one of Ukraine’s leading theater companies, known for its intensively physical performance style coupled with rich vocal work. From 1991 to 2001 Sadovska worked as a principal actor, composer, and music director with the Gardzienice Centre for Theatre Practices in Poland directed by Vladimierz Staniewski. With Gardzienice, Ms. Sadovska traveled throughout Eastern and Western Europe as well as to Brazil, Egypt, Japan, and the United States, appearing in the company’s productions of The Life of Protopope Awwakum, Carmina Burana and most recently Metamorfozy, which she co-created with composer Maciej Rychly using relics of ancient Greek music. In 1998, for her role in Metamorfozy she won the “Best Actress Award” given by the Polish Theatre Union. As the musical director of the Gardzienice Theatre, Ms. Sadovska has conducted numerous workshops at colleges, universities and arts centers around the world, including one with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford, UK.
Since the fall of 1999, Mariana has appeared as a collaborating artist in three Yara Arts Group festivals at La Mama Experimental Theater in New York. As Yara’s Artist-in-Residence in the 2000-2001 season, she created the music for Song Tree (2000), Kupala (2001/2002), and Obo: Our Shamanism (2001) and also performed in these pieces. At La Mama, Ms. Sadovska also conducted special workshops on Ukrainian traditional Calling Songs, Winter Songs, Spring Songs and Late Spring Songs. In addition, she performed as a soloist at the Golden Festival and the Balkan Cabaret in New York.
In 2003, Ms. Sadovska created the music for the production of Bogoslaw Schaeffer’s Qwartet, directed by Andre Erlen at Forum Freies Theater in Dusseldorf. Current projects touring internationally include Callings and In the Beginning There Was a Song, both duo performances with the Israeli experimental vocalist Victoria Hanna; and the multi-media Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors with Poland’s Quartet Jorgi and the Berlin-based film-maker Hiroko Tanahashi. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors toured the US in February, March, and April 2004.
For the past thirteen summers, Mariana Sadovska has traveled to villages in the Poltava, Polissia, Hutsul, and Lemko regions of Ukraine to collect folk songs and rituals. In each village she has cultivated deep relationships with elder culture-bearers whose lives, songs, and stories have inspired much of her recent work. In 1993 she organized a large expedition to Ukraine with an international group of artists, musicians and researchers. In November-December 2001, Mariana helped organize the second annual Festival “Ukraine-Poland-Europe” at the Gardzienice Centre for Theatre Practices for which she brought village singers together with artists working on the cutting edge of contemporary performance practice.
Altmaster (Poland) recorded Mariana Sadovska’s vocal work for Gardzienice’s Metamorfozy in 2000. In June 2001, Global Village Music USA released Songs I Learned in Ukraine, a CD of Sadovska’s modern interpretations of favorite songs gathered from her Ukrainian village expeditions. Later that year, in collaboration with Radio Lublin (Poland), Yara Arts Group (USA), UNESCO, and other international sponsors, she produced Song Tree, a collection of polyphonic folk songs sung by village elders from Polissia and Poltava. Mariana was most recently in the Bay Area for a theatrical production of her haunting piece The Rusalka Cycle preformed by KITKA Women’s Vocal Ensemble.