Dai-na, dai-na, wanna be loved,
Dai-na, dai-na, gonna take my wild changes,
Dai-na, dai-na, freedom above,
Dai-na, dai-na, I’m wild ‘n’ dancing!
Гей! (Hey!)
Напевно даремно, (Surely for nothing,)
Була я надто чемна (I was too polite)
Shydy-rydy dai, shydy-rydy dana. (2x)
Для тебе, для себе, (For you, for myself,)
Застелю ціле небо. (I will make a bed of the whole sky.)
Гей! (Hey!)
Shydy dai, shydy-rydy dana. (2x)
Без жалю запалю, (Without sorrow, I’ll start the fire,)
Go, go, go, wild dancers!
(Refrain)
Dance forever, come and be mine!
Dance together till the end of time!
Dance together!
Go, go, go wild dancers!
(Lyrics reprinted from Pavlyshyn 2006, 473; translations
from Ukrainian are my own.)
In reference to this song, literature scholar Marko Pavlyshyn has suggested that “the lyrical ‘I’ … identifies her as ‘wild’: her condition is one of pre-civilizational naturalness, perhaps of noble savagery.” Pavlyshyn argues that this association with wildness acts as “Ruslana’s … refutation of the Orientalist stereotype. By association with the wild beast, she has strength, and it is strength that inflects her attitude toward love” (2006, 474). Pavlyshyn elaborates on the European Enlightenment ideals espoused through Ruslana’s confident assertion of herself as “wild,” arguing that her “wildness” operates as a form of “European-ness.” But I think another interpretation is possible: instead of a confident reversal of the Orientalizing gaze, the text of the song may also be heard as an expression of postcolonial desire, as a yearning for inclusion. Ruslana sings, “I want you to want me,” and one can hear it as aspirational allegory or as a formulaic attempt at seduction through popular music, instead of as an empowered solidarity with European values. By rehearsing some of the clichés of Orientalism—including the eroticizing of the mysterious “other” (here, the Hutsul)—Ruslana’s auto-exoticism in “Wild Dances” attempts to slake the European public’s thirst for the exotic at its eastern borders.
Ruslana thus refashions the ethnic intimacy cultivated for the Ukrainian public through Dyki Tantsi into a strategic and erotic auto-exoticism for the benefit of an imagined European public. Was Ruslana’s auto-exotic strategy unique in the context of Eurovision? Arguably not, since, as Janelle Reinelt writes, “Eurovision … annually constructs the collective memory of European cooperation while dramatizing the impossibility of escaping the borders and boundaries of nation and culture, gender and sexuality, self and other. Participating countries are united less by geography than by media space. Otherwise, the contest serves as a consolidating cross-cultural discourse, situated squarely in the popular domain, wherein the struggle over European identity plays out” (2001, 386). With regard to Turkey’s winning entry in 2003, when pop star Sertab invoked stereotypical musical and visual gestures evocative of “Turkey” (including the arabesk, the harem, and the Turkish baths), Thomas Solomon points out that “trading on, and taking advantage of, familiar orientalist tropes and Europe’s fascination with exotic Turkey was … shrewd marketing, however politically incorrect it may seem from progressive and Europeanist Turkish points of view” (2005a, 8). In “Wild Dances,” Ruslana’s ambition was to combine the language of Eurovision kitsch with a claim for Ukraine’s legitimacy as a European state through a marketing language of Wildness that at once romanticized the object of her research while firmly asserting its location in Europe.
Ruslana’s auto-exotic representation of Hutsul culture as representative of the whole of Ukraine doubles as a bid for European identity, albeit one filtered through the unique, kitschy sensibilities of the Eurovision Song Contest.5 Between the Dyki Tantsi and Wild Dances albums, as her primarily Ukrainophone domestic audience expanded to an international (primarily European) public, Ruslana’s persona also underwent a radical shift, as the guileless post-Soviet estrada singer metamorphosed into an “Amazonka.”
From its first iteration in 2002, Ruslana’s Hutsulian Project was marketed with flamboyant language, positioning Ruslana as a uniquely skilled curator tasked with the mission of “popularizing” the ancient traditions of the Hutsuls for the modern consumer. Due to the international ambitions of Ruslana’s Hutsulian Project, even early press releases were made available in multiple languages, including English: “The colors of Hutsul music, fiery rhythms, dance that pulls you into its circle—that’s the energy that lights a fire in the soul! The music of Ruslana stores this fire. She brought the rhythm of the mountains to the stage and made it modern, cultish [sic]” (press materials, 2002).
In the lead-up to the Eurovision performance, Ruslana’s marketing language became even more ostentatious: “Without giving [the] audience an opportunity to take a breath from the impression, here we see wild and sexy, hot and dangerous, mystic and knowledgeable about all the secrets of Carpathian mol’fars (shamans) mountain Amazonkas. Fur and leather, ethnic weapons, danger ous games and unique meditations all of this charms and entertains you, gives shimmering in the heart [sic]” (press materials, 2004). This heightened pitch of her marketing language corresponded to the increased sexuality in Ruslana’s self-presentation and self-identification: whereas the Ruslana of “Znaiu Ya” was modestly dressed in a tailored full-body leather suit, a shoulder-length bob, and an unassuming grin, the Ruslana of Wild Dances emerged as an “Amazonka,” predatory and stern, with an expansive mane of gnarled hair and an innovative wardrobe of bikinis, microskirts, and studded leather accessories.
Ruslana’s identification as an Amazonka was first and foremost a nationalist allusion, referencing the ancient Scythian warrior women who inhabited parts of modern-day Ukraine (the Crimean peninsula and the “wild field” (dyke pole) to its north, but not modern-day Hutsulshchyna) in antiquity. Famously described in Herodotus’s Histories as archetypal barbarians, these Amazon warrior women battled on horseback, and were reputedly willing to amputate their right breasts to facilitate shooting arrows (2003, 276–79). Ruslana knowingly drew on this history аs she reconstructed her persona as a fierce and wild woman, even releasing a 2004 music video to the song “Oi, zahrai my muzychen’ku” (originally included on the album Dyki Tantsi) filmed in Crimea, where she is depicted as a horseback-riding free spirit who viciously beats up her cheating boyfriend on the shore of the Black Sea.
Ruslana’s erotic auto-exoticization—predicated initially as it was on the image of Hutsuls—became a contentious source of debate for scholars, critics, and Hutsuls themselves, especially as the image of Ruslana-as-Hutsul-woman became conflated with Ruslana-as-Amazonka. Ruslana justified the change as an outgrowth of her prolonged ethnographic study of Hutsul culture, legitimized by her cooperation with ethnomusicologists from her alma mater, the Lysenko Academy of Music in L’viv. Ruslana’s turn toward this reputed institution historically devoted to the systematic study of rural folklore was significant as a legitimizing step in the reinvention of the material (despite the fact that some of her consultants later distanced themselves from the work), and as a brace against accusations of exploitative exoticism. Emphasizing the “exotic” and “ancient” aspects of Hutsul culture as truisms ostensibly observed during Ruslana’s own field expeditions, she validated her license as an artist to exploit these facts. Pavlyshyn explains that “just as the music of Wild Dances was publicized as the fruit of Ruslana’s own ethnomusicological research in the Carpathians, so the costumes were explained as the outcomes of the meticulous collection and study of ethnographic data” (2006, 481–82). This explanation, however, did not pass the muster of Hutsuls themselves: in the course