- November 20, 2014
Featuring a discussion and reading from The Showman and the Ukrainian Cause.
When: Thursday, November 20, 7 pm
Where: Transcona Public Library (111 Victoria Avenue West)
Cost: FREE
About the Book
The quixotic and volatile Vasile Avramenko (1895–1981) used folk dance and film in a life-long crusade to promote Ukraine’s struggle for independence to North American audiences. Energetic and charismatic, but also manipulative, impractical and vain, he was a controversial figure for decades.
Born in a village near Kyiv, Avramenko established himself as a performer and dance teacher among Ukrainian émigrés in central Europe. He immigrated to Canada in 1925 and organized a network of Ukrainian folk dance schools by appealing to the new immigrants’ patriotism and to their yearning for cultural survival. Determined to conquer Broadway, he moved to New York City in 1929, oversaw his expanding web of dance schools, and began to stage elaborate (money-losing) spectacles of dance and music.
By the mid-1930s, Avramenko’s frenetic activities expanded to filmmaking. He called for the creation of a “Ukrainian Hollywood” and begged and borrowed enough money to produce two feature films with director Edgar G. Ulmer, the “king of ethnic and B movies.” After the Second World War Avramenko’s career declined and his last decades were spent traveling as far as Australia and Israel in fruitless attempts to entice sponsors to fund his dance spectacles.
Based on extensive original research, The Showman and the Ukrainian Cause provides a vivid portrait of how culture and politics can intersect in a diaspora community.
Orest T. Martynowych is a historian at the Centre for Ukrainian Canadian Studies, University of Manitoba. He is the author of Ukrainians in Canada: The Formative Years, 1891-1924.
