{"id":24315,"date":"2023-09-20T09:00:20","date_gmt":"2023-09-20T16:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/?p=24315"},"modified":"2023-09-14T14:08:45","modified_gmt":"2023-09-14T21:08:45","slug":"yaga-looks-at-witches-slavic-culture-through-murder-mystery-lens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/2023\/09\/20\/yaga-looks-at-witches-slavic-culture-through-murder-mystery-lens\/","title":{"rendered":"Yaga<\/em> looks at witches, Slavic culture through murder-mystery lens"},"content":{"rendered":"

Those who love a good take on a murder mystery, whether it\u2019s an old-fashioned Agatha Christie novel or an episode of CSI<\/i>, and love to play detective and try to figure out who did it, might want to take note of The Belfry\u2019s newest play, Yaga<\/i>.<\/p>\n

According to Nicholas Nahwegahbow, the actor who plays both Rapp and Henry in the show, Yaga<\/i> is about telling the important story of Baba Yaga.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy co-star, her name is Anastasiia [Ziurkalova], and my assistant director, her name is Diana [Budiachenko]… they\u2019re from Kyiv and they are joining us and helping us tell the story of Baba Yaga, which is a Slavic folklore story,\u201d says Nahwegahbow.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Yaga<\/em> takes a look at, among other things, the definition of the word \u201cwitch” (photo by David Cooper).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

While the play is centred around a witch, the classic definition of \u201cwitch\u201d doesn\u2019t encapsulate what those working on Yaga<\/i> hope to accomplish.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re changing the definition of the word \u2018witch\u2019 a little bit,\u201d says Nahwegahbow. \u201cWe are trying to reclaim the power of motherhood, women, and femininity. Particularly for one of the characters, she\u2019s a professor and she\u2019s 60 years old and she has somewhat of a romantic entanglement with a younger boy named Henry who goes missing. It\u2019s a bit of a whodunit, murder-mystery kind of piece. It\u2019s very exciting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nahwegahbow says that he loves working on Yaga<\/i> because of the play\u2019s fun nature and how it upsets traditional relations between men and women.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI like the pace of it, I like how much fun it is,\u201d he says. \u201cI like how it changes the power dynamics between men and women… Typically, traditionally, men are very much in positions of power and in this play it is the opposite. The women know more and they do more.\u201d<\/p>\n

The best part of Nahwegahbow\u2019s time on the play was preparing the opening scene.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe best day we had on the play so far would have to be working on the opening scene,\u201d he says, \u201cbecause it was very exciting to jump into the text after working on it independently.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nahwegahbow says the toughest challenges that he and the crew faced in bringing Yaga<\/i> to life was the intimate perspective of the play.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think a big challenge is the intimacy of the scenes, which we have an intimacy director for,\u201d he says. \u201cThere\u2019s moments where characters touch and are very close and having to have the trust of your scene partner can be very difficult… It\u2019s a little bit of a challenge, but everyone here is very, very open-minded, and open-hearted, and trusting.\u201d<\/p>\n

The main thing that people should expect from Yaga<\/i>, says Nahwegahbow, is to have fun and to gain a little bit of knowledge about the Slavic people.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the audiences can expect a fun murder-mystery ride which changes their perspective on the word \u2018witch,\u2019\u201d he says. \u201cI want the audience to take away a bit of knowledge about Slavic culture as well as a bit of knowledge of the story of Baba Yaga, which is very familiar to Ukrainian and Russian people. I would also like the audience to know that we are welcoming Ukrainian actors on our stages and that we support and stand with Ukraine.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yaga
\n<\/i>Various times,\u00a0until Sunday, October 8
\nVarious prices, The Belfry
\nbelfry.bc.ca<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Those who love a good take on a murder mystery, whether it\u2019s an old-fashioned Agatha Christie novel or an episode of CSI, and love to play detective and try to figure out who did it, might want to take note of The Belfry\u2019s newest play, Yaga. According to Nicholas Nahwegahbow, the actor who plays both […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":24316,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,295],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts","category-september-20-2023"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24315"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24315\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24317,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24315\/revisions\/24317"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}