For the last 10 years, RealTime Arts founders Molly Rice and Rusty Thelin have honed a brand of interactive theater where the audience is as important to the final stage work as playwright, actors, director and stage crew.On April 11 at Carnegie Coffee Co. in Carnegie, their “Build Me A Voice: The Grit and Soul of Ukrainian Folklore” will offer a behind-the-scenes look at RealTime’s play development process.“A society’s folklore tells a lot about who we are, what we revere, what we say about ourselves that we can’t say formally,” says Rice. “Build Me a Voice” features actors Hazel Carr Leroy, Tim McGeever, Nancy McNulty McGeever, Josh Saboorizadeh and Lish Danielle along with live music by Oleksandr and Mari Frazé-Frazénko.Previous RealTime Arts productions have focused on recent immigrants to Pittsburgh from Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon, Ukraine, Italy and Vietnam. Last fall, the company hosted the Pittsburgh appearance of Little Amal, the puppet theater event created by the Handspring Puppet Company of South Africa to draw international attention to the plight of refugees.Oleksandr and Mari Frazé-Frazénko immigrated to Pittsburgh in March 2023, a year after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. They are City of Asylum artists and perform frequently with their Happy Lovers Band, which will be featured at the May 20-23 Bridges: City of Asylum Pittsburgh Creative Summit.The Happy Lovers Band have perfected a unique form of jazz-rock-Ukrainian folk fusion. From left: Darren Moore, Oleksandr Frazé-Frazénko, Mari Frazé-Frazénko, Hellcat Sneer. Photo courtesy of The Happy Lovers Band.Oleksandr, 35, is a prolific filmmaker, writer, painter, sculptor and musician with more than 50 albums and a dozen published books of poetry, including a Ukrainian translation of Doors singer Jim Morrison’s poetry. Mari, 29, is a riveting singer whose fluid contralto sails effortlessly through an array of styles.Recently, NEXTpittsburgh talked with Molly, Rusty, Oleksandr and Mari at Nova Place.NEXTpittsburgh: What was the inspiration for putting together “Build Me a Voice”?Rusty Thelin: It’s intended to be a kickoff for the community engagement phase of a larger project we’ve been working on for a couple of years now. That project is titled, “there is a blue that only children see,” and it has metamorphosed over time, as you can imagine, because the news from Ukraine changes almost daily, and the project itself keeps mutating as we go. Molly Rice: “Build Me a Voice” is the start of an arc that’s part of a larger whole, and it’s a piece influenced by the community. Pittsburgh has the fifth-largest Ukrainian population in the country, and there are a lot of people here for whom it matters. We hope to connect Ukrainians in Ukraine through our partners DTCare, with Pittsburghers of Ukrainian descent and those with interest in the fate of Ukraine. NEXTpittsburgh:  You have some very versatile actors lined up. What will the actual creative format be for the evening? Rice:  During the evening the audience will hear Ukrainian folktales with some musicalized moments, and they’ll hear songs written by Oleksandr and Mari. Then we’re going to break into groups and talk about what we’ve just witnessed. Are there images that really struck you? Are there parts of these stories that remind you of folktales you know? The fairy tales we Americans grew up with. These comments will be folded into the final version of “there is a blue that only children see” we hope to premiere in November.NEXTpittsburgh: Is the idea to blend the dramatic dialogue and music with elements drawn from the reality happening now with Ukraine and with Ukrainians in America?Rice:  Here’s an example. In 2017 we got a grant from the city’s Office for Public Art, which is now called Shiftworks, to create a project for and with the Afghan refugee population in Pittsburgh. We got really involved for a whole year. Rusty was working with the resettlement group as a housing specialist setting up houses for people. I would shadow caseworkers, so we got to know many Afghan families in Pittsburgh. On a recent weeknight, RealTime Arts directors Rusty Thelin and Molly Rice lead a rehearsal of “Build Me a Voice: The Grit and Soul of Ukrainian Folklore” inside Oleksandr and Mari Fraze-Frazenko’s home studio. “Build Me a Voice” features the couple’s music, live performances of Ukrainian folklore and a behind-the-scenes look at RealTime’s play development process. Photo by Katherine Mansfield.Thelin:  What we saw was that the men knew English, but the women did not. And the kids were learning English really fast. You saw this rapid assimilation of the whole family, except for the woman, and we figured, you know, theater being a “we sport” would be a good way to help them connect. Rice:  So we built a project based around their desire to have the first Afghan food business in Pittsburgh. We got them training and partnership with organizations where they got trained in commercial kitchens and got their service certifications while we created a show based on their life stories, which had never been told to anyone.NEXTpittsburgh: And that show was called “Khūrākī”?Rice:  Yes, in the Dari dialect of Farsi spoken in Afghanistan that is the word for “eat” or “meal.” And starting in 2019 we did our first run of “Khūrākī” across Pittsburgh. Since then we’ve taken it to Cleveland, spoken about it to audiences through the National Endowment for the Arts and at the Theatre Communications Group national convention. WQED did a documentary that was nominated for an Emmy.Thelin:  We spent two years developing that and learned so much about immigrants and refugees. We knew we could not waste that experience. So, we were at the ready for how we can engage that experience again. NEXTpittsburgh:  Oleksandr and Mari, you came to Pittsburgh just two years ago. What kind of music were you performing in Ukraine before the Russian invasion?Mari Frazé-Frazénko:  Before I met Oleksandr, I was a pop singer, pop and jazz. Bestselling author, filmmaker and renowned musician Oleksandr Fraze-Frazenko plays a haunting sound on his guitar while his wife, Mari, sings, during a rehearsal for “Build Me a Voice” at the end of March. The couple began creating music together at home in Ukraine during the blackouts, leaning into the haunting sounds of war, before relocating to the U.S., where they continue expressing themselves and their beliefs without fear. Photo by Katherine Mansfield.Oleksandr Frazé-Frazénko:  She was a pop star back then. She had some radio hits and things like that, and then she met me.Mari:  Everything changed. Oleksandr:  I was starting to plant my ideas into her head, and now they are growing, you know. NEXTpittsburgh:  Besides your rock and jazz fusions and the originals based on Ukrainian folk tunes, you’ve worked in other musical genres. Mari:  We did a R&B/Rap album in Africa just before coming here. We have done punk. Classical music for the orchestra, a lot of things. What else?Oleksandr:  An analogy would be John Zorn who does so many other genres rather than just one. I can relate to his approach because it’s just different tools. You say the same thing but with different tools. NEXTpittsburgh:  When did you meet Rusty and Molly?Oleksandr:  We met at City of Asylum. I had a poetry reading, and you guys came up, and we started talking, and I said, hey, we’re going to have a music show in a week at the Government Center. Rice: And we came to see their band.Mari:  And we met these beautiful people. Since then we did so many things together. RealTime Arts co-founders Rusty Thelin and Molly Rice draw inspiration in a pile of pandas. Photo by Laura Petrilla.Rice:  When we met Oleksandr and Mari, we knew we wanted to work with them. There’s an intellectual dialogue that is hard to find. I feel like that when you find that, you really want to hang on to it.Oleksandr: We had just started working on a program called Ukrainian Poetry Songs. I wanted to show how Ukrainian traditional songs influence Ukrainian poetry.Rice:  And that was how we got interested in including folklore into the theater piece. Folklore writ large, so folktales, folk music. There’s something Oleksandr says in the preface of his book:  “Folklore and folk songs belong to the folk. They’re not owned. They can adapt.” For me that means they can expand to include not just one people but many cultures, multiple cultures, especially at times when we need to come together. Thelin:  “Build Me a Voice” is a good example of the RealTime Arts play-creating process — a mix of craft and community. The work I grew up doing was rooted in the community theater experience. To do community theater, you have to have a love of theater. A love of the art and craft of it. But you also have to have a belief in something. It’s your belief that whatever the show is about can solve problems and transcend them.Rice:  Once you start writing, it’s what I call “lace writing” where you write the lace part, the leaves, the holes. And hopefully you craft a meaningful pattern where people’s voices can come up out of it. You’re bringing in their information, their lived experience and their brilliance and weaving it together with your own writing. Once I started doing that, I sort of found my home. I guess I feel like real people are more interesting to me than making up 10 fictional people. From left: Rusty Thelin, Oleksandr Frazé-Frazénko, Mari Frazé-Frazénko and Molly Rice work on a scene from “Build Me a Voice.” Photo by L.E. McCullough.NEXTpittsburgh:  By putting stories and insights from real people into the theater piece, you’re increasing the possibility of audiences understanding other perspectives than just the playwright.Rice:  I don’t think the goal is to understand each other as much as it is to try. You lean forward to try to understand, but we’re not supposed to understand the inner part of every person. Thelin:  It’s OK not to understand all the time. Rice:  The idea is to recognize somebody’s experience that isn’t your own and relate to it to a certain extent. But no matter how empathetic a person is, they can’t have the same experience. That’s not what art is for. It’s to open up the question and to sit in the not-knowing. Thelin:  “Build Me a Voice” is not going to be a place where people come and politics are thrown out on the table, people getting tense about things. It’s a celebration of the beauty of Ukraine. We’re talking about folk stories and how universal those are. There’s going to be free coffee, y’all!Rice:  And free smoothies and tea!Thelin: It’s going to be coffeehouse casual, and we really want people to have a good time at this event and listen to some great music and hear these wonderful stories. RealTime Arts presents “Build Me a Voice: The Grit and Soul of Ukrainian Folklore” Friday, April 11, 7-9 p.m. at Carnegie Coffee Co., 132 E. Main St., Carnegie, PA. Minimum donation, $20, includes free coffee, tea, smoothies, light refreshments. Tickets.The post Ukrainian folklore comes to life in RealTime Arts’ ‘Build Me a Voice’ in Carnegie appeared first on NEXTpittsburgh. ...read more read less