Working across spoken word poetry, dance, theatre, butoh, clown and song, Olenka Toroshenko’s practice is a tapestry of ancestral memory, contemporary culture and spiritual intent.
She recently released a single based on her experience with endometriosis and hopes it will help develop more understanding and compassion for the common, but often misunderstood, condition. Now based in the Adelaide Hills, she was born in Vegreville, Canada, and has a background in news broadcasting, politics and policy.
How did you get into music and song writing?As a Ukrainian Canadian, it’s actually pretty normal to sing folk songs in multi-part harmony.
Singing with my family, with my community and in multiple choirs growing up meant that music was always around me, woven into daily life.
Once I moved to Australia, though, something shifted.
I met my best friend and creative collaborator, Allara, and from that moment on, writing music took on a whole new meaning.
New ways of creating music were born, it was collaborative between my voice and her bass and ideas started bouncing.
From that point on, I’ve listened to the tunes and harmonies that arrive in my head and then found a way to translate them into words and sounds.
I first started writing poetry more professionally when I worked in political communications in my early twenties.
I got used to writing for other people, being published under other people’s names.
It wasn’t satisfying, writing that much and never getting any credit. It wasn’t until my late 20s that I realised I could be writing for myself and making a larger societal and cultural impact by using my own voice and my own words to speak my truth on a stage rather than in Parliament or press.
Could you tell us a little bit about your connections with both Ukraine and Canada?All of my grandparents and ancestors on both sides of my family are from Ukraine.
I grew up speaking Ukrainian at home, in school and with my community.
Canada has the largest diaspora of Ukrainians outside of Russia and Ukraine in the world, and my hometown was the densest per capita in Canada.
I first travelled to Ukraine in 2007 to tour as a Ukrainian folk dancer.
That was an incredibly powerful experience, connecting with my ancestral homeland, tracking down and meeting relatives, speaking my mother tongue with an entire nation and meeting the land where the bones of the ancestors lie – a lot of different parts of me started to make more sense.
I returned to Ukraine multiple times over the next decade working as an international election observer.
That experience allowed me to meet Ukrainians in small villages in areas of the country that I would never normally visit and offered me a perspective on contemporary Ukrainian political and social life in a way that really opened my eyes.
I was there pre-invasion in 2014 and post – two different worlds. I met Ukrainians who didn’t understand how I could speak the language not having been born there, or why I was volunteering to help them establish democracy.
Once I explained to them that my grandfather would never have imagined a day that he would live to see Ukraine free and democratic and that I was there to continue to support my own people, a new kind of understanding and kinship dawned on them.
Of course I hold a Canadian passport.
Canada celebrates multiculturalism, not just with words, in action too. And there is a very, very exuberant Ukrainian diaspora, and that is very recognised and celebrated in Canada.
How have they shaped your life and art?I grew up going to a Ukrainian Orthodox church and hearing the church chanting and prayer.
And I dare say that a lot of my music and the things that I write are informed by the deep minor key that was in my ears every Sunday growing up.
And then, of course, so much of the creative work that I make is based in my culture and my language and what it is to maintain that and celebrate that and dance that into existence as a contemporary human being living away from home.
In more recent years, with the war in Ukraine, I see more than ever a need for the Ukrainian community to find ways to gather that aren’t only about responses to the war, in ways to experience healing and connection, and art is an incredibly powerful medium to do that.
When and why did you move to the Adelaide Hills and what has been your experience moving here? Has that experience shaped your art?I moved to the Adelaide Hills in March of 2020. My partner is Australian and he’s originally from the Hills, and when we were deciding where to settle during the pandemic (we were in Melbourne) we decided to come back, knowing that his family and community were here.
My experience of living in the Adelaide Hills has been potent.
As soon as I came to the Hills, it was like the doors of opportunity opened and all of these little signs kept coming where ease and support and new opportunities were arising and it felt obvious.
The experience has definitely shaped my art because I no longer live in my own cultural context and have been learning to find out who I am when I’m not at home.
So many different creative opportunities and creative like-minded humans have come out of the woodwork and asked to collaborate and introduced themselves and invited me to be a part of their projects, it’s an incredible blessing, really, to be welcomed with open arms into a new place as a foreigner.
What is your experience with endometriosis?What a loaded question that no amount of magazine space can encompass. I guess what I’d say is, ask someone you know.
One in seven Australian women have endometriosis, so chances are a family member or friend of yours is living and struggling with it right now.
It’s all-consuming, it’s excruciating pain, it’s deep organ pain and damage, it’s an inability to maintain a stable job, to have normal bodily function, to walk with ease.
I ended up very lucky and was able to be diagnosed and have a surgery in May of 2021 here in Adelaide and that, alongside working with numerous practitioners including an incredible Chinese acupuncturist that lives in Adelaide, I’ve been able to relieve my life of symptoms or at least relieve them enough to have some semblance of a life back.
I still live with a chronic illness that is invisible and is often forgotten by the external world around me.
It forces me to advocate for myself and for fellow women and people with endometriosis to have external compassion and understanding, flexibility in employment, to be taken seriously at a doctor’s office.
All of these things are not common and are not socially normalised. We’ve got a long road ahead of us, to get to a point where our employment and medical and social systems take women’s pain and suffering seriously.
What inspired you to write about that experience?Funnily enough, it was something my pelvic pain specialist said.
She told me that in order to heal the trauma, I had to talk about it.
As an artist, you make beauty from your pain in hopes that it connects you back to yourself and with the world around you, and that it might connect you with other people who are having a similar experience so that you don’t feel so alone.
I think that’s why I wrote the single Bloody Uncomfortable, because I know so many women and people around me suffering in silence. And I had gotten to a point where I was ready to not be silent anymore and wanted to give voice to all of us who have been missing work and suffering with pain.
What do you hope that the single Bloody Uncomfortable achieves?Think big right?
I’m going to speak to where I want things to go and if
Bloody Uncomfortable plays any small part in that, then fantastic.
I would love for Australia to join Japan, Spain and Portugal in passing laws to grant people with endometriosis, adenomyosis and polycystic ovary syndrome fully paid menstrual leave every month.
We hear a lot of talk about support, but if we were paid to take care of ourselves, the financial gains would show in the long run.
And if this sound-designed poem reaches even one more person who didn’t know about endo and helps them grasp the magnitude and scale of the people affected, then I’ve achieved something.
One more person who might carry some compassion for a fellow human having a rough go.
