About the Podcast
Serving you a hearty bowl of Ukrainian culture with a side of sour cream.
As Ukrainian dancers, we know there’s a lot more to Ukrainian culture than red boots and a big stage smile. That’s why we started Vsi.
Pronounced “vsee”, vsi means “all, all of, everyone, everybody” in Ukrainian (всі is how it looks in Cyrillic). And that’s exactly what we’ll be talking about.
This is a joint project between us, Hannah Picklyk and Kaitlin Vitt. We became NDN (a.k.a. НДН a.k.a naykrashchi druzi nazavzhdy a.k.a. BFFs) while living in Ukraine from September 2017 to June 2018, studying dance, culture, and language and sustaining a steady diet of fried cabbage.
While there, we trained with professional folk dance ensembles, attended university programs, and watched amateur dance school classes full of soon-to-be professionals.
In Ukraine, we learned a lot about dance and culture, and a lot about ourselves, both in and out of the studio, and that year serves as inspiration for Vsi. By no means do we consider ourselves experts — in anything, really. Well, maybe you could call us expert learners, people who are continually curious about the world around us and especially in Ukrainian dance and culture. Vsi is a way to feed this curiosity.
On the show you’ll hear:
Explorations of Ukrainian traditions, folklore, music, ethnography, and historical and modern-day culture
Interviews and conversations about Ukrainian dance around the world
Heart-to-heart chats with other lovers and experts of Ukraine
Stories from our times in Ukraine
Our voices stumbling over words and creating run-on sentences due to the number of Ukraine-related thoughts going through our minds
Our Roots
Our moms have a mutual cousin, Carol. Our babas have a mutual friend, Pearl. And we have a mutual love, Ukrainian dance and culture.
Meet Hannah
Hannah Picklyk grew up dancing with the Selo Ukrainian Dancers, where today she is a lead instructor. She went to school for science, but after completing her degree and telling her family she was moving to Ukraine (during a chicken wing dinner), her life path changed forever.
Hannah loves vsi about Ukrainian culture but especially enjoys learning about Ukrainian ethnography and costumes. She dreams of hosting a party with all her favourite Ukrainians who live around the world. Unrelated, but equally as important, Hannah loves turtlenecks and bodysuits.
When she’s not choreographing, instructing, or dancing, Hannah is planning for the next time she is choreographing, instructing, or dancing.
Meet Kaitlin
Kaitlin Vitt grew up dancing with the Rossdale Ukrainian Dance School, where today she is an instructor. She joined Troyanda Ukrainian Dance Ensemble in 2010 and has travelled with the group throughout Eastern Europe, including to Ukraine.
Inspired by her Ukrainian background and pidpenky-filled backyard, Kaitlin enjoys writing about Ukrainian culture on her blog kaitlinvitt.com/ukraine, focusing on stories not only from her year abroad but also from Canada’s Ukrainian diaspora.
The day she was born, Kaitlin made the world a grammatically better place. Her favourite food group is coffee, with dairy-free cream — what a snob. When Kaitlin isn’t hunting for the next hidden story to write, she’s searching for the next up-and-coming Ukrainian rapper (surprise, it’s her!).
