Kirovohrad, in the heart of Ukraine, has a legitimate claim to being the birthplace of Ukrainian stage folk dance — it’s where Vasyl Verkhovynets first brought folk dance onto a real stage, working with Mykola Sadovsky’s pioneering Ukrainian theatre company and later writing “Theory of Ukrainian Folk Dance,” the first systematic work of its kind. His student Vasyl Avramenko carried that work abroad, and later masters — Pavlo Virsky, Anatoly Kryvokhyzha, Klara Balogh, Darius Lastiwka, Rafail Malinowsky, Yaroslaw Chuperchuk among them — kept building on that foundation back home.
Prolisok itself descends from that lineage almost by accident. In 1970, a young dancer named Anatoly Korotkov was working under Kryvokhyzha’s direction at the renowned Yatran ensemble; when Korotkov later started his own children’s ensemble, its first audience buried the stage in spring violets and bluebells — “prolisky” in Ukrainian — and the name simply stuck. Without a permanent home in its early years, the company moved between rehearsal halls until the mid-1980s, when Korotkov built it a dedicated school in under a year — ballet halls, wardrobe, classrooms, everything a young dancer training seriously would need.
Under instructors including Korotkov, Vasyl Bosyy and Viktor Pokhylenko, Prolisok has become a genuine training ground — a place Ukrainian Dance Workshop Tour participants have visited and come away, by their own account, thoroughly amazed. It’s a fitting legacy for a company whose city can trace Ukrainian stage dance back to its very beginning.
