A Sibling Came Back From the Dead Onstage
Ania Bohachevsky Lonkevych, 58, is the executive director of the Syzokryli Ukrainian Dance Ensemble and Roma Pryma Bohachevsky School of Dance.
My mother was born in present-day Poland in ’27 and moved to Lviv. She danced with the Lviv Opera and Ballet Theatre at 14 and became their youngest soloist during the war. She had an older brother, and somehow they got separated—he missed a train and ended up in the Soviet zone and was transported to Siberia for years. My mother and my grandmother didn’t know whether he was dead or alive.
I think it was 1950 that she immigrated to the United States, and she had the privilege of taking classes with Martha Graham, José Limón, and Katherine Dunham. After I was born, that was the end of her career as a performer. She founded the Roma Pryma Bohachevsky School of Dance in 1964 and the premier Syzokryli Ukrainian Dance Ensemble in 1978. She wanted to preserve and perpetuate the art; she firmly believed that it was one of the best ambassadors of Ukrainian culture. She was a prolific choreographer; she must have had over 40 different pieces of choreography for the ensemble. One allegorical ballet depicts the Ukrainian struggle against Russian oppression—very apropos. With the regional dances, she heavily researched the costumes. Music is different in the various regions, and so are some steps. Western Ukraine, the mountains, is much livelier. It’s more jumpy, as opposed to eastern Ukraine, where you can feel the magnitude of the steps.
I was a year old when she started the school. I didn’t like babysitters much. So I went with my mother and sat through tons of rehearsals. I guess I was a pain in the neck, but I would sit on the studio floor and just watch as my mom taught. When I was 14, I became the youngest member of the ensemble. The majority of us were first-generation kids, but we also had some members of the school who were not Ukrainian at all. They just happened to come upon the culture and fell in love with it. If you could dance, she wanted you.
In the summer of ’92, we went on tour to Ukraine, to an independent Ukraine. And that was—I have goose bumps as I recollect my time there. At the Lviv opera house, my mother looked at me and said, “This is the stage where my career started.” And in Ivano-Frankivsk, at the end of the performance, my mother went to take a bow. An older gentleman came onstage and knelt before her. It was her brother, whom she hadn’t seen in 40 years.