Every staged folk dance has an ancestor — an older, unpolished source that a choreographer eventually reworked for the theatre, filtered through their own vision and the abilities of their dancers. Finding that unaltered original, untouched by any stage production, gets harder every year. High in the Carpathians, in the town of Verkhovyna, one family has kept that search almost unnecessary.
The Ilyuks are a 32-member family who form their own folk dance ensemble, and for 33 years — since 1982 — their repertoire has stayed genuinely unchanged: “Vipche Hutsulka,” “Resheto” (Sieve), “Vynyk” (Broom) and “Arkan,” danced exactly as previous generations of the family danced them, passed down as inheritance rather than choreography. When family patriarch Mykola Ilyuk starts “Arkan” — by his own description, meant “to make the mountains shake” — men as old as 75 join the dance, moving from a slow start into a full, accelerating whirlwind, jumping over topirtsi laid on the ground, tools Hutsul belief holds can even be used against the devil himself.
The family has carried this same unfiltered tradition abroad, performing in France to audiences who greeted them with genuine enthusiasm, and to diaspora Ukrainians who’ve been moved to tears seeing it performed so authentically. For Ukrainian Dance Workshop Tour participants, a visit to Verkhovyna offers something genuinely rare: the chance to watch “Arkan” performed by both a trained professional company like Hutsuliya and by the Ilyuk family itself, back to back — a direct, visible lesson in exactly how a dance travels from its village source to the professional stage, and what, if anything, gets left behind along the way.
