Mariana Sadovska (Born in Lviv, Ukraine) has lived in Cologne, Germany, since 2002. She has worked since 1991 in Europe and the US as a composer of dramatic works and songs, in her concerts as a singer and multi-instrumentalist, as well as an actress and director of musical theater projects. She finds considerable inspiration in the traditional music of Eastern Europe, Caucasus and Central Asia, whose sounds she systematically explored in new arrangements and her own compositions with quite unusual sound patterns. In her work, the past is contemporary and the regional universal.
She trained as a classical pianist at Lviv’s National Music Academy Ludkevycz. Later she joined Les Kurbas Theatre, one of Ukraine’s leading theater companies. From 1991 to 2001 Mariana worked as a principal actress, composer, and music director with Teatr Gardzienice in Poland. The music-theater Gardzienice received worldwide acclaim for its virtuoso “anthropological-experimental” performances rooted in rugged fieldwork in isolated rural areas of the world. Many festivals and expeditions led to Japan, Brazil, Egypt, the UK and the US. In 1998 she was nominated for a “Best Actress Award” in Poland.
A grant from the Earth Foundation brought her to New York in 2001. There she produced her first concerts of experimental and improvised music with musicians such as Anthony Coleman, Michael Alpert, Frank London and Victoria Hanna. In 2002 she presented her first CD, “Songs I Learned in Ukraine” (Global Village Records). Mariana was a scholar of “Künstlerstipendium” Staatskanzlei NRW/Germany, “Fulbright”/USA, and “Princeton Atelier” curated by Toni Morrison at Princeton University.
Sadovska appears regularly in concerts and workshops in the US at Public Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Princeton / Harvard / NY University, Symphony Space / NYC. Other Scholarships in the US allowed her to continue her music theory studies and works on dramatic compositions.
In Germany, she founded her band “Borderland” to experience with them her furious interpretations of traditional songs and chants from Ukraine. With this group she apprears inter alia on WDR Radio Hall, Festival tff Rudolstadt, in the program of the Cologne Philharmonic Festival “Musiktrienale” at Alter Wartesaal, for SWR in Mainz, in the world music series “Klangkosmos NRW”.
As an experimental solo performer with voice and harmonium or piano she is welcome on stages in Germany, Switzerland, Italy, the UK, Ukraine, Armenia, Afghanistan, Turkey, Israel and the US .
With her composition “The Rusalka Cycle – songs between the worlds” she toured many festivals like “Giving Voice” Poland, “Globalize:Cologne” Germany, and “Revolutions International Theatre Festival” Albuquerque USA.
Since 2001 she has composed vocal music for different international theater and music ensembles in Germany, Poland, Czech Republic and the USA. Her composition of “SCLAVI – the song of an emigrant” with Farm in the Cave of Prague was nominated for the Alfred-Radok Award in 2006. In the same year she was awarded for her performance with her band “Borderland” with the “creole Award for World Music in NRW”. In 2007 she was also nominated with “Borderland” for “creole” national award. Most recently, on a commission for Kronos Quartet, she created a composition called “Chernobyl. The Harvest“ for one voice and string quartet.
In 2013, she won the German World Music Award RUTH: “With Mariana Sadovska an extraordinary artist was awarded with the main prize of RUTH 2013. Seemingly restless, she searches for new forms of expression for songs that have their origin in Ukraine: Mariana Sadovska, who as few have the ability to implement her artistic research (meticulous done by herself), is also an internationally recognized composer and stage performer.” (jury statement)