Marika Kuzma ’77 grew up in Hartford in a community of Ukrainian-Americans. She spoke the language, sang the songs, was immersed in the culture.  

As the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine approaches, Marika feels deep inside her the pain of a country from which her parents were forced to flee in the middle of World War II. 

“Bombs and tanks coming from different directions,” Marika said. 

Now the bombs and tanks are back. 

“It’s a very challenging time right now for anyone of Ukrainian descent,” shares Marika. “I am living in two worlds … Half of me is here and half of me is there.” 

The half that was here on the Loomis Chaffee campus on Thursday, February 16, fully engaged students in various classes and small groups where Marika spoke about cultural resilience and the power of music, poetry, images, ideas, activism, and so much more. 

Marika has always expressed herself through music, from singing to conducting and leading the choral program at the University of California, Berkeley, for 25 years. She was trained at The Hartt School before earning multiple degrees on her way to traveling the world to perform, conduct, and teach. Ukrainian might have been her first language but so was the language of music. And the power of words and actions.  

“The career path you choose ... you can choose to live and work it in such a way that you are compassionate toward others and are affecting social change,” she told a group of students in the Alvord Center for Global & Environmental Studies.  

“In my work as conductor and choral director, I am enabling these singers in front of me to explore their voices and I am giving them tools to fully use their human voice their entire lives. I also wanted to expose them to many cultures, many languages, many centuries of music because I wanted them to be citizens of the world who understood from the inside out what these cultures were. There is nothing like singing in another person’s language and feeling that vibration; you get a sense of what that culture has been through. Another goal is to give voice to composers and poets from various cultures because they have something to say. And one more is to serve the community … I would say to my students at UC Berkeley that our focus is on how do we serve our community here, what are we going to give in the way of music and concerts every year that will console the audience, rile them up if need be, and educate them about whatever is happening in the world now or has been happening for centuries. That is how I approached my work.”  

Later in the day Marika also was scheduled to conduct a concert choir workshop; attend a “Dinner and a Draft” hosted by the Writing Initiatives program in which the topic was “From Darkness to Light: A Sharing of Poems and Songs from Ukraine;” and attend the musical Cabaret. 

Marika is scheduled to be back on the Island on February 20 to lead a Norton Seminar on “Awareness, Advocacy and Responding to Injustice” and work with junior English and Public Speaking students on “Embodying Word, Sound, Spirit: Poetry of Resistance from Ukraine.” She will also attend a recital sampler as well as facilitate a workshop with the Chamber Singers. 

It is a busy schedule, but as Marika says, since the war broke out, she has been running on adrenaline. That first day she shared Ukrainian music with conductors she knew around the country. “What can I do?” she asked herself then. It is a question that will not go away. 

“Last week I had dinner with psychiatrists who came from Ukraine to Yale to study new PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] techniques,” Marika said. “They said we are all suffering from this in some way. We can never do enough … can never do enough.” 

Marika’s visit is a joint effort between the Dean of International Students Office and the Performing Arts Department, along with the Alvord Center, the Norton Center, Writing Initiatives, and Center for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion.