ВИА-Гра/VIA-Gra and the "New [post-] Soviet Woman"

The Ukrainian/Russian "girl group" (an awkward fit for numerous reasons) VIA-Gra will be the focus of one of the chapters in my upcoming book; one of my many guilty pleasures for over a decade, I still follow the transformations and permutations of this eternally changing group.  The group, despite it's ostensible existence as (what many would argue is) yet another commodified "musical" group/product, one venally exploiting female corporeality for financial gain (and thus encroaching, yet again, upon female agency within the realm of the musical), is - I will argue - an incredibly complex formation encompassing sonic, visual, and discursive parameters in an implicit questioning of gender hierarchies, Western feminist hegemony, and (more recently) national sovereignty.  The variable of the human voice - central to the book project - will also be engaged in my examination of VIA-Gra, in part by attention to the group's more recent (self-) presentation highlighting the fact that, yes, really, we can sing.  (How well they sing, is a decision each person can make for herself.)

First, the name.  A play on words and Soviet musical history.

Once upon a time, in the cold-war era, the Soviet authorities, knowing they couldn't entirely eradicate young people's desire for the devil's music, rock 'n' roll, decided to attempt to channel its destructive attributes (its hyper-sexuality, for one) into something more wholesome, more refined, more uplifting for its komsomoltsy (communist youth).  And thus, the VIA (ВИА) was born - Вокально-Инструменнальный Ансамбль (Vokal'no-Instrumental'nyi Ansambl' - which, I assume, needs no translation).  Here are some of my favorites (and I've written about a couple of these song here):

ВИА Верасы, "Я у бабушки живу" (VIA Verasy, "Ia u babushki zhivu"/"I Live with Grandma")

ВИА Синяя птица, "Урок сольфеджио" (VIA Siniaia ptitsa, "Urok sol'fedzhio"/"The Solfege Lesson")

ВИА Песняры, "Вологда" (VIA Pesniary, "Vologda")

SO...with the understanding that "gra" (гра) means "game" in Ukrainian (and "igra" has a similar meaning in Russian - game, or play), the group VIA-Gra is the "Vocal-Instrumental Ensemble 'Play'."

And indeed the Russian, the Soviet, and the Post-Soviet are all on display in this song/video, "День без тебя" ("Den' bez tebia"/"Day without You"):

The imagery here is, I think, an excellent representation of the complexity of constructions of the feminine and the female that draw upon, concurrently, both current and anterior cultural scripts (as, I suppose, all do); women here are represented as intelligent (they're in charge of a space probe that will clean the sun of cosmic dust, thus allowing life on earth to continue) and empowered; caring, selfless, and maternal (after a collision with a cosmic projectile, they are unable to return to Earth, but carry out their mission so that their children might live); and (depending upon one's personal aesthetics) sexy.  Cosmonauts in heels and spandex - but with little ones back at home.  This juxtaposition of attributes may, via the optics of "western feminism" be seen as some sort of "conflict" - at the level of representation - between exploitation and empowerment, but I will argue in my book that for many Russian women, such a supposed "conflict" is a non-issue; the desire for beauty (to be beautiful, to witness beauty) is not seen as disempowering, but rather the exact opposite, taken in the context of Soviet history where the "stripping away" of one's gender (and one's ability to create one's self as a gendered individual) was experienced by many as the ultimate attack on empowerment and subjectivity.

This is the penultimate line-up of VIA-Gra, before the group was entirely disbanded, and then re-configured via a reality show (in Ukraine) Я хочу в ВИА-Гру (Ia khochu v VIA-Gru/I Want to Be in VIA-Gra) - Al'bina Dzhanabaeva, Nadezhda Granovskaia-Meikher (one of the original members), and Eva Bushmina (stage name of Iana Shvets').  Bushmina arguably had one of the best voices of all the "singers" who had taken part in the group, and I think her inclusion signaled a direction for the group - one in which the voice/singing was to be seen as (almost) important as the singers' physiognomies/bodies.

Not incidentally, numerous members of VIA-Gra have parlayed their celebrity as part of the group into viable solo careers; here, one of Al'bina Dzhanabaeva's latest:

Альбина Джанабаева, "Надоели" ("Nadoeli"/"Bored")

And from Eva Bushmina:

Ева Бушмина, "Собой"

Well.  So much to be made of this, indeed.  According to the director "the main idea of this video is the eternal confrontation between man and the environment, the search for harmony, the search for one's self in this space."  Uh-huh.