As my friend negotiated the unpaved mountain roads in his small tank-like Soviet Lada, I sat in the back seat and imagined that Kosmach might actually be different from scores of other Hutsul villages that I had visited earlier that week and on previous trips—it was, after all, the end point of the thin, snaking line on the map. After hours passing through scenic mountain vistas and roadside villages, we finally rolled into Kosmach, where a large Ukrainian Orthodox church and a few small cafés framed the center of town. As it started to drizzle, we ducked into the only café that appeared to be open. Inside, three teenagers—two girls and a boy—sat sharing a Snickers bar and text messaging each other with their cell phones from across the table. In my field notes, I jotted the observation that, while Kosmach was geographically remote, its isolation did not preclude such technologically sophisticated—if also technologically alienating—forms of modern teenaged flirtation.
We introduced ourselves, and I shared that I had come to Kosmach to investigate the source of inspiration for Ruslana’s brand of etno-muzyka. One of the teenagers, Lida, who was also the daughter of the café’s proprietors, leaped forward with an opinion that was echoed with differing degrees of intensity, but a notable amount of consistency, by the majority of the Kosmach villagers with whom I spoke later that week. She explained, “Ruslana came in with a huge crew; it went well. We dressed up in our folk costumes for her and staged a wedding. Everything was fine. But I can’t say that people are happy about it—especially about the name of the project, Dyki Tantsi (Дикі Танці, meaning Wild Dances).1 How, in what way, are we wild (дикі)?” My video footage from that summer cuts from Lida to a scene that followed just a few minutes later: a wedding band called Kosmats’ka Pysanka (Kosmach Easter Egg)—composed of many of the same musicians Ruslana had hired for her project—led a wedding procession through the center of town. They waved at us, an invitation to join the parade of partygoers in festive, but not folkloric attire. I fell in line and spent the next two days at the wedding party gathering their perspectives on Ruslana’s representation of their village in her Hutsulian Project.
Now to the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) held in Istanbul one year earlier. In 2004, Ukraine was the tenth country to take the stage at the ESC, a forum that “notoriously mingles kitsch with geopolitics” (Heller 2007, 199). Ukraine was thought to be in a statistically unfavorably placement, sandwiched between Albania and Croatia in the middle of the competition. It was also one of the two newest participating countries in the 49th annual ESC, having entered for the first time in 2003. Over one hundred million viewers in thirty-six countries were reported to have taken part in the 2004 televised contest, making it the biggest televoted contest in world history at that time. As described in the introduction to this book, Ruslana gave an energetic performance of her song “Wild Dances,” which drew on familiar sonic and visual gestures of Hutsul exoticism, repackaging them as a message of Wildness with a European-facing aspiration. After all of the thirty-six participant national broadcast companies reported their countries’ televoting results, Ruslana and her squad of Wild Dancers were proclaimed victorious. The win rocketed Ruslana to heights of international stardom unprecedented for a post-Soviet Ukrainian pop musician in the early twenty-first century (see Fig. Intro.1).
In addition to the specifically Hutsul stereotypes of “wildness” represented in “Wild Dances,” the performance also trafficked in generic tropes of exoticism. In some cases, it blurred the lines between what was supposed to index Hutsuls specifically, and exoticism globally. This was most evident in how Ruslana’s sartorial choices were perceived. In the aftermath of the competition, her aesthetic was compared frequently to Xena the Warrior Princess, the protagonist of the popular fantasy television show of the mid-1990s. Xena’s violent, ambiguous, and kinky sexualized presentation has been noted (Morreale 1998); Ruslana was careful to distinguish the pacifism of her Wildness: “Ruslana—who has always maintained her work is entirely innovative and original—admitted she could see the parallels between her ‘Wild Dances’ costumes and those worn by US TV character, Xena the Warrior Princess. However, she maintained that unlike Xena, the ‘Wild Dancers’ are not hostile, merely ‘wild in style’” (Eurovision press release, 2004).
Other connections to Ruslana’s depictions of Wildness were made after the competition. One effect of the attention given to the discursive presence of Wildness in Ruslana’s “Wild Dances” was that it persistently configured Hutsuls in relationship to discourses of Wildness through musical performance in complex ways that muddled the global and local. In some ways, the song simply revived old discourses of the archaic Wildness of Hutsul music, making those discourses accessible to fans of Eurovision who had never considered Ukraine as a space of such enticing exoticism before the ESC. In other ways, it diluted the specificity of Hutsul positionality and their unique history of being represented as “wild.”
Ruslana’s capitalization on Wildness—as it echoed generic conceptions of “otherness” and as it was negotiated in daily use as a result of her numerous “wild projects”—is one theme of this chapter. I examine, in turn, Ruslana’s initial musical experiments exploiting tropes of Hutsul Wildness, the reception of this Wildness by the Hutsul community that bears the stigma of a deep history of objectification as the “wild folk” of Western Ukraine, and then Ruslana’s shifting ideas about and politicization of Wildness in recent years. This chapter, then, provides an overview of how one celebrity musician’s wild music exploited different tropes of exoticism for the benefit of different audiences in order to make different political claims over the span of a decade bracketed by popular revolution.
The force of Ruslana’s celebrity and her widely circulated depictions of Wildness also offer some insights on emergent sovereign imaginaries between the Orange and Maidan Revolutions. After the ESC, Ruslana’s new visibility as Ukraine’s premiere pop cultural export endowed her with authority as the promoter of what she called “the Ukrainian image” for international audiences, a role in which she reimagined the meaning of Wildness and its relationship to Ukrainian-ness in accordance with shifting visions of Ukrainian statehood between the Orange and Maidan Revolutions. When Ukraine plunged into political turmoil with the start of the Orange Revolution in late 2004 following rampant electoral fraud in the contest for the presidency, Ruslana allied herself with the pro-Western reform candidate Viktor Yushchenko, who was eventually elected to the presidency. In the winter months during which Ukrainian state activities were effectively frozen due to the enormous protests that paralyzed the Ukrainian capital, Ruslana performed “Wild Dances” and other hits on the revolutionary stage that was erected in central Kyiv.
After the Orange Revolution, Ruslana was appointed to be Ukraine’s first Goodwill Ambassador by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in 2005. In March 2006, she was elected to the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian Parliament, as a representative of President Yushchenko’s Nasha Ukraina (Our Ukraine) coalition (a position she relinquished in June 2007).2 Meanwhile, she became the spokesperson for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE) campaign against female trafficking in Europe, appearing in television commercials in Ukraine and throughout Europe. In 2008, she premiered what she called the “social single” titled “Not for Sale,” which she composed as the anthem for the anti-human-trafficking league based in Vienna, Austria. She also used it to tease her new album, Wild Energy, which featured Missy Elliott and T-Pain, two prominent US hip-hop artists, as guests on two tracks. In recent years, Ruslana has been photographed