A beautiful young woman takes the stage of a televised talent competition. In the U.S. or Britain, she would likely break into song or dance or a combination of both. But this is "Ukraine's Got Talent," and this performing artist doesn't utter a sound. Rather, Kseniya Simonova begins to weave a magical story with nothing but dark sand, background music, and her talented fingertips.
Live on stage, the sand animator wordlessly tells the story of the Nazi invasion of the Ukraine, with idyllic scenes transformed into war-ravaged landscapes, civilians fleeing, and a pretty girl aging before our eyes into a grieving old widow and, then, a tomb for an unknown soldier.
The clear metaphor is that life and all we dream and build is as ephemeral as sand being whisked across a tableau.
For a finishing touch, Simonova blows out the candle lighting her work.
The entrancing performance moves the Ukrainian judges and audience to tears and a standing ovation. It's in stark contrast to the exhibition(ism) of another young female contestant, who essentially jiggles her way through a water-drenched, partially clad belly dance. Proving there's still justice -- and taste -- in some parts of the world, Kseniya wins the overall talent competition, an outcome that could only occur in a culture not completely steeped in commercialized entertainment... right?
That observation was put to the test in June on that great international sounding board, YouTube, when a user uploaded the clip of Simonova's May 2009 performance with no hype and mostly Cyrillic text.
Since then, the video has attracted over half-a-million views and the spotlight of Western media, from the U.K.'s Guardian to the U.S.'s Huffington Post. And suddenly, Kseniya Simonova has become the most popular artist in any genre or medium to emerge from the Ukraine since poet-painter Taras Shevchenko in 1840.
The combination of the world's most primitive medium -- sand -- and the newest -- online video -- enabled this to happen. It all began, of course, with the kind of skill and vision you don't usually find on talent shows.
Another video of Simonova's work can be found here on Youtube.
