“Veseli Cherevychky” — “Jolly Boots” — is a children’s vocal-choreographic ensemble founded in 1990 at Lviv Secondary School No. 6, with performers ranging from as young as 3.5 to 14 years old, each one singing, dancing and acting across a repertoire of roughly 25 numbers built from Ukrainian tradition, rite and custom, alongside comic scenes and rhymed announcements. Despite the young age of every performer, the productions are staged to a genuinely professional standard — the result of serious work from both the dancers and their teaching and artistic staff.
The company’s reputation has traveled well past Lviv. After a 1995 performance in France, one French reporter described being completely won over by the children’s professionalism, and Ukraine’s then-ambassador to France praised the young performers’ talent and its impact on French audiences and media alike. Veseli Cherevychky has gone on to perform for army units and industrial enterprises across the Lviv region, toured Poland and Germany, played to audiences along the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts, and was one of just 82 ensembles worldwide selected to perform at Disneyland Paris — where, by every account, they charmed the French crowd just as thoroughly as they had five years earlier.
Prize-winning appearances at festivals through the early 1990s only add to a track record built on something simpler than any trophy: the group’s own program opens and closes with the same sincere line — “we love Ukraine” — sent out, night after night, in the very language the youngest performers are still learning to master.
