video sparked massive interest among viewers on Ukrainian television. The success of the “Znaiu Ya” single led to Ruslana’s signing with Comp Music, the Ukrainian affiliate of the global music label EMI. This was followed by an invitation to produce an album of songs from her Hutsulian Project at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios in England, a famous locus for hit “world music” albums. The Dyki Tantsi album recorded there consists of ten original songs with an additional remix version of the hit single “Znaiu Ya.” Most of the songs incorporate token Hutsul sounds such as the iconic trembita (alpine horn), tsymbaly (hammered dulcimer), drymba (jaw harp), and a variety of wooden flutes and recorders (sopilka, floiera, telynka, dentsivka). Many songs use the scansion and declamation associated with the Hutsul song form known as kolomyika.
On the album Dyki Tantsi, the lyrics are exclusively in Ukrainian and marked by Ruslana’s urbane, L’viv-based pronunciation, though she stresses well-known Hutsul tropes by pronouncing key terms in dialect, or by dropping the ends of words (as is the convention in village-style performance). Rhythmically, the songs emphasize syncopations associated more with male Hutsul foot-stomping dances than the regular oom-pah played by Hutsul bubon drummers, though the rhythmic dimension of much of the album evokes a generic “tribal” world music quality more than anything specifically Hutsul. Less than six months after the album was released in June 2003, it reached platinum sales in Ukraine, breaking another record for Ukrainian commercial music. The commercial success of the album led to Ruslana’s nomination to represent Ukraine at Eurovision, thus giving Ruslana access to new international audiences, for whom the ethnic intimacy of Wildness would resonate differently. Just as intimacy “may be protected, manipulated, or besieged by the state, framed by art, embellished by memory, or estranged by critique,” so does Ruslana’s Wildness accrue new meanings once it is made salable to diverse international audiences on the Eurovision Stage (Boym 2000, 228).
THE EROTIC AUTO-EXOTIC
Two years after the “Znaiu Ya” premiere, Ruslana released the album Wild Dances (a direct translation from an earlier Ukrainian-language release, Dyki Tantsi). On the heels of her 2004 Eurovision victory, the album topped the charts in Belgium, Greece, and Cyprus, and made it to the top ten in many other European countries. In the course of these two years, the pop star also reinvented herself as a pop icon whose unrestrained sexuality and ferocity drew upon ancient Slavic and Soviet archetypes of femininity.
The Eurovision-winning titular song “Wild Dances” is sung half in English, half in Ukrainian. The lyrics feature a recurring “Hey!” (in the studio version, the booming “Hey!” comes from a field recording of Hutsul highlanders), and also the prominent use of Hutsul vocables such as shydy-rydy-dana:
Just maybe I’m crazy,
The world spins round and round and round.
Shydy-rydy-dai, shydy-rydy dana. (2x)
I want you to want me
As I dance round and round.
Shydy-rydy-dai, shydy-rydy dana. (2x)
Forever and ever—
Go, go, go wild dancers!
(Refrain)
Dai-na, dai-na, wanna be loved,
Dai-na, dai-na, gonna take my wild changes,
Dai-na, dai-na, freedom above,
Dai-na, dai-na, I’m wild ‘n’ dancing!
Гей! (Hey!)
Напевно даремно, (Surely for nothing,)
Була я надто чемна (I was too polite)
Shydy-rydy dai, shydy-rydy dana. (2x)
Для тебе, для себе, (For you, for myself,)
Застелю ціле небо. (I will make a bed of the whole sky.)
Гей! (Hey!)
Shydy dai, shydy-rydy dana. (2x)
Без жалю запалю, (Without sorrow, I’ll start the fire,)
Go, go, go, wild dancers!
(Refrain)
Dance forever, come and be mine!
Dance together till the end of time!
Dance together!
Go, go, go wild dancers!
(Lyrics reprinted from Pavlyshyn 2006, 473; translations
from Ukrainian are my own.)
In reference to this song, literature scholar Marko Pavlyshyn has suggested that “the lyrical ‘I’ … identifies her as ‘wild’: her condition is one of pre-civilizational naturalness, perhaps of noble savagery.” Pavlyshyn argues that this association with wildness acts as “Ruslana’s … refutation of the Orientalist stereotype. By association with the wild beast, she has strength, and it is strength that inflects her attitude toward love” (2006, 474). Pavlyshyn elaborates on the European Enlightenment ideals espoused through Ruslana’s confident assertion of herself as “wild,” arguing that her “wildness” operates as a form of “European-ness.” But I think another interpretation is possible: instead of a confident reversal of the Orientalizing gaze, the text of the song may also be heard as an expression of postcolonial desire, as a yearning for inclusion. Ruslana sings, “I want you to want me,” and one can hear it as aspirational allegory or as a formulaic attempt at seduction through popular music, instead of as an empowered solidarity with European values. By rehearsing some of the clichés of Orientalism—including the eroticizing of the mysterious “other” (here, the Hutsul)—Ruslana’s auto-exoticism in “Wild Dances” attempts to slake the European public’s thirst for the exotic at its eastern borders.
Ruslana thus refashions the ethnic intimacy cultivated for the Ukrainian public through Dyki Tantsi into a strategic and erotic auto-exoticism for the benefit of an imagined European public. Was Ruslana’s auto-exotic strategy unique in the context of Eurovision? Arguably not, since, as Janelle Reinelt writes, “Eurovision … annually constructs the collective memory of European cooperation while dramatizing the impossibility of escaping the borders and boundaries of nation and culture, gender and sexuality, self and other. Participating countries are united less by geography than by media space. Otherwise, the contest serves as a consolidating cross-cultural discourse, situated squarely in the popular domain, wherein the struggle over European identity plays out” (2001, 386). With regard to Turkey’s winning entry in 2003, when pop star Sertab invoked stereotypical musical and visual gestures evocative of “Turkey” (including the arabesk, the harem, and the Turkish baths), Thomas Solomon points out that “trading on, and taking advantage of, familiar orientalist tropes and Europe’s fascination with exotic Turkey was … shrewd marketing, however politically incorrect it may seem from progressive and Europeanist Turkish points of view” (2005a, 8). In “Wild Dances,” Ruslana’s ambition was to combine the language of Eurovision kitsch with a claim for Ukraine’s legitimacy as a European state through a marketing language of Wildness that at once romanticized the object of her research while firmly asserting its location in Europe.
Ruslana’s
