Vsi: The Podcast
There’s a lot more to Ukrainian dance than red boots and a big smile.
Vsi is a Ukrainian dance and culture podcast that shares stories from choreographers, dancers, and instructors while discussing popular topics such as ethnography, music, and the art of dance.
Pronounced “vsee”, vsi means “all, all of, everyone, everybody” in Ukrainian (всі is how it looks in Cyrillic). And that’s exactly what we’ll be talking about.
This is a joint project between me and Hannah Picklyk. We became NDN (a.k.a. НДН a.k.a naykrashchi druzi nazavzhdy a.k.a. BFFs) while living in Ukraine from September 2017 to June 2018, studying dance, culture, and language and sustaining a steady diet of fried cabbage.
While there, we trained with professional folk dance ensembles, attended university programs, and watched amateur dance school classes full of soon-to-be professionals.
In Ukraine, we learned a lot about dance and culture, and a lot about ourselves, both in and out of the studio, and that year serves as inspiration for Vsi. By no means do we consider ourselves experts — in anything, really. Well, maybe you could call us expert learners, people who are continually curious about the world around us and especially in Ukrainian dance and culture. Vsi is a way to feed this curiosity.
On the show you’ll hear:
An insider’s look at the studio life of Ukraine’s top folk ensembles
Interviews and conversations about Ukrainian dance in Canada
Stories of exploring Ukraine, with our top picks of where you need to go
Our voices stumbling over words and creating run-on sentences due to the number of Ukraine-related thoughts going through our minds
