Last weekend Ruslana presented her new single Dances with Wolves. Very much in the spirit of the song that the singer performed last year at the Eurovision contest, her latest video is pounding and uninhibited. The clip tells a general story intertwined with documentary footage of events on Kyiv’s Independence Square. In fact, Ruslana’s video was already half-made when the revolution broke out, so the singer added “orange inserts” to the basic footage shot by the Russian Yevgeniy Mitrofanov on stage when the song was ready. The Kyiv segment of the video was a first for Oles Sanin as post-production director/editor, although he has made music videos before (for the group Haidamaky). Ruslana’s latest video tells the story of a girl who is kidnapped and thrown, for fun, into a cage with wolves. The heroine stoically accepts the new realities and manages to tame the animals. Then she leaves the cage. There is no violence as such — only dances that bring peace and spiritual equilibrium, says Ruslana.
Presenting the single at the Arena sports and entertainment complex, the singer joked a lot and begged the audience to put aside their press releases and cut her off if she talks too much. The “rebellious” singer was the focus of close attention: among the guests was Artur Gasparian, a journalist from the Russian newspaper Moskovskiy komsomolets. This is not the first time that Ruslana has released a single rather than an album: the last time was when she released the enormously popular Wild Dances. This song is now a gold hit in Belgium and is about to do the same in Sweden and the Czech Republic. Fans of Ruslana’s songs are sure to like Dances with Wolves: the same Hutsul melodies, the same driving spirit, plus the story that is all the rage: the change of power in Ukraine. Incidentally, Sanin, who directed the movie Mamai, said he is planning a project called Revolution. Live. He gave special thanks to Kyiv’s Dovzhenko Film Studios for promptly supplying him with cranes and cameras. In fact, they delivered the equipment within some three hours or so to film Ruslana’s performance on Independence Square.
The singer is heading out soon on a tour of schools in the UK. For this reason (and others) Ruslana is doing a crash course in English and will be taking exams shortly. During the video launch, she occasionally switched to English, but she was still getting her tenses wrong. Ruslana is sure to overcome this problem because she seems to have plenty of time for this. All she is thinking about is the future.
