(upbeat music) - [Announcer] This is a production of South Dakota Public Broadcasting.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Good evening and welcome to "Levitt In Your Living Room".

I'm your host Apolona Davalos and I'm so excited to be here, especially since "Levitt In Your Living Room", their mission is to build and bring community together through music.

And that is what we're going to do here tonight.

So this is an exciting time, but first and foremost, grace and gratitude, a sincere thank you to our 2021 seasoned presenting sponsors, Sanford Health, and "Levitt In Your Living Room" with SDPB sponsors, Dan and Arlene Kirby for their support in tonight's programming.

The Levitt show in Sioux Falls is part of a nationwide network of outdoor music venues and concert sites.

As coveted anchors of community life, friends, family, and neighbors of all ages and backgrounds can come together on the Levitt lawn and just be unified and celebrate life through the power of music at these free live music events.

So on that note, the people responsible for this, we'd like to give a special shout out to Mortimer & Mimi Levitt Foundation, and you can learn more about them at levitt.org.

On a fun note, this April, the Levitt is going to release their summer schedule, but you get a sneak peak of one of the 40 amazing artists that'll be hitting the lawn this summer.

So tonight it is my honor to introduce Lemon Bucket Orkestra.

The Lemon Bucket Orkestra are known for as folk music revolutionaries.

For myself, hearing their music, they give such an organic sound and what people have said about them is just how they celebrate life, celebrate culture, celebrate history.

You are definitely getting a wide scope on a global worldly scale of the different dances, languages, sounds.

I just can't wait for you to meet are the lead vocalist and violinists of this band, Mark Marczyk.

So without further ado, Mark, hello, welcome.

- Oh my God, I think I need to celebrate another coffee if I'm gonna get up to your level.

(Apolona laughs) And I happen to have one right here, thanks to being at home, so I'm gonna take a sip.

- Do it.

The world is watching at home, take a sip with Mark.

Okay.

We're all in this together.

- And hopefully, the rest of like Lemon Bucket will be at home sipping their coffees or whatever it is that they sip, 'cause I assure everyone watching at home that you're not coming to see just me, it's not an orchestra of one, you know.

Although I wish that I could play all those instruments at once, but I guess I'm just gonna have to play with other people.

I miss the guys and girls and we're really looking forward to getting down to Sioux Falls and actually playing live together.

- We can't wait for that energy.

So for us to prepare, tell us where you are right now and Lemon Bucket Orkestra, a little intro into your origins.

- I'm in Toronto, Canada right now.

And most of the band is here.

Although a couple of our members are kind of stuck slash quarantining in other places, Naoki, our trumpet player's in Japan Os Kar, our drummer's in Mexico, Julian's out in Ottawa.

So we're kind of all over the place right now.

How did we start?

Usually when we're touring, I tell this story so many times, and now that things have kind of like slowed down, I actually have to like try and remember how it was that we actually met.

I think like we started as a group of four, there were four of us who kind of met and we came back to Toronto after our various travels and we were all kind of missing the same thing in our lives.

And that was this kind of the power of traditional folk music, anybody who's kind of like played or been a part of songs, circles, or parties or kitchen parties, knows that like when you're in that sort of folk music scene, it's so inclusive, it's so active and welcoming and it's just something that we all wanted, we were missing in Toronto.

And so we decided, let's just start playing together.

A big part of it for us too was playing on the streets was busking.

We all sort of started as buskers.

And so we said, let's just go out and start playing, surprising people in the places that they don't expect to hear music maybe.

And that's sort of like brought us up to really get a sense of like being in touch with our audience and not necessarily audience that's like they're already fans, but just new people, what that is and how we actually connect through music.

So anyways, when we started, like I said, just playing on the streets, we were playing a whole bunch of these songs from Eastern Europe.

And one of them is called "Lemon-Cheeky", it's a song from Odessa, from the Black Sea coast of Ukraine.

And in it, it's kind of like, it's this old, like Yiddish, like the way that I would explain it, it's like a Yiddish rap battle, kind of, it's two old guys that are like going at each other, talking about like, who makes more money, who's got the baddest lawn, who's whatever.

And back in those times, dollar bills were lemons.

That was the slang.

So there's a verse where they're like talking about like, who grows the most lemons on their balcony.

And I really like that, this thinking of like thinking of lemons, money as the lemons and all that, it's really interesting.

So anyways, we used to say that we'd go out onto the streets and we put out our bucket and we work for our lemons.

- I love that.

So with this first song, which is earlier in your career, "Bratislava", tell us a little bit about what we're about to see.

- Okay.

So what's weird is about our kind of trajectory as a band is that most bands, they start locally and then they kind of like play around and they might go to a neighboring city when they go to tour.

But our first tour was an international tour to Romania.

And our second tour was like a full on Eastern European tour.

And the way that happened was just through friends of friends.

A bunch of us had gone the year before to this festival in Romania called the International Romani Art Festival.

And they invited us when they found out that we created this band in Toronto, they were like, this is the kind of energy that we need, how we wanna represent our culture to our people and get them excited.

There's these kids from Toronto are into this, they're not playing whatever the modern mainstream music is.

They're actually into our traditions.

This is what we wanna tour around the country.

And we went and it was nuts.

We had no idea what we were getting into.

And 13 of us got on a plane, went to Romania and did 17 shows in 16 days in different cities, just driving through the night, getting up, doing soundcheck, playing, driving through the night, that kind of a thing.

And that led us to be invited back.

And on our second tour, we were playing in Vladicin Han, which is in the mountains of Serbia.

And we went there only because our heroes, Boban and Marko Markovic were from that village.

And so we went to meet them.

We went to seek them out, meet them, play with them.

And while we were there, we played for a festival presenter that was going to this conference in Macedonia.

We decided to go with him.

When we got there, we played and this guy said, "You should come to Bratislava."

We got in our van and drove to Bratislava that night and played a show.

And this video is from that show.

- Oh my gosh.

Yes.

So you're on a journey, ladies and gentlemen, let's all dive into Bratislava.

(instrumental music) (band singing in foreign language) The languages that we're singing in, there's many languages.

There's Macedonian, Serbian, Ukrainian, Russian, Romani, many different languages.

And we play songs from all over Eastern Europe.

(instrumental music) Some of us have an Eastern European background and some of us don't, but all of us are really attracted to the energy of the music.

And there's something in there that we found expression in and it brought us all together and now we're playing it.

So it's a little bit of history and just finding the right people and the right music, but also just the energy of the Balkans, of the Gypsy people, of Jewish people, of Slovak people.

(instrumental music) We have violins, accordion, guitar, flugelhorns, saxophone, sousaphone, tapan, darbuka, we have a dancer, a clarinet, and then we also have at home, a few people who didn't come with us, a trombone, a sopilka, another trumpet, another violin, lots of them, another singer.

(band singing in foreign language) (instrumental music) (audience cheering) Well, that's the great thing.

I mean, people often ask us why don't you play more original new music?

And I mean, all of us play in other bands where we play original music, we have some proposers in the band that compose original music.

The great thing about folk music is, is that it's music that's been around for a very, very long time.

And no matter what part of the world you go to, there are people who know it or a version of it, and you can sing and play.

A group of musicians from Canada can come to Slovakia and sing a song and have never met, and you'd never heard of us before, but you know the song and you can sing along and it makes you happy.

So there's something magical about rearranging and re-imagining traditional music, what it can be like and how it can bring people together across the world.

(instrumental music) (Mark speaking in foreign language) Mark Marczyk, Lemon Bucket Orkestra.

(audience singing in foreign language) - I love the energy that you bring to an audience and how we can all sing along, just come together when we're back to just touching one another, joining hands, that synergy, you really do have a gift for that.

So into our next video as we're getting to know an inch being introduced to Lemon Bucket Orkestra, tell us about "Goodbye".

How shall we celebrate this next piece?

- Well, I mean, it's a song about a woman who is pretty much saying like goodbye to her lover and having these like, he's going away on a ship and she's having these like conflicting emotions of like first being really sad and then being really angry and then feeling suicidal and then being really actually grateful.

And there's sort of whirlwind of emotions that we go through when we're in love, essentially.

I really love this song that Marichka brought us because it kind of speaks to me of like the general, the energy of Lemon Bucket, like what's important to us.

We never had this thing of like, okay, we wanna play one type of song or we're gonna be this kind of band.

Like we're gonna be a party band, or we're gonna be world music like theater band or whatever, or a busking band.

We kind of always felt that our main goal is just to get people to feel anything, like whatever it is.

It's just about feeling whatever your emotion is and living with that emotion, acknowledging it, accepting it, celebrating it.

And it's okay that if it's a bad one, it's okay, if it's a good one, whatever the case may be.

So this song, it's a live version, the video that you're gonna see, and we're not really big on music videos, those people who like to go and check out Lemon Bucket online, you'll see that we've done like two music videos.

This is one of the two of them in our like 10 plus years of being a band, which is ridiculous for like any band that's as established as ours.

But we've always, the reason that's happened is like, we're so into the live, we're really a live band.

So we decided, forget about trying to make this, like, we made one kind of like artsy, narrative video, and it was cool, it was a lot of fun, but we decided for our second one, that we just wanted to bring a whole bunch of cameras into a live show, into our home venue, the venue that we've sort of played probably the large venue we've played the most, add in Toronto, the opera house and try and capture it.

And so that's what you're gonna watch.

- So let us all together, open our mind, heart, body to this loving, oh, immersive experience.

Let's watch and check it out.

(instrumental music) (singer singing in foreign language) (both singing in foreign language) (audience cheering) (audience singing in foreign language) Mark, that was beautiful.

- I'm just like watching that thing again, I love that we caught as well as the song, the end of the show, because that's usually, I mean, it's been a tradition of ours to finish our show in that way with the nigun, which is a Hasidic tradition of singing songs on Shabbat.

And we always go into the crowd literally breaking down that barrier so that we can end up with our audience arm-in-arm arm singing together.

And it just makes me happy that we caught that on video at the opera house.

- I am glad to, it almost allows for those of us who are going to be present and see you in person, it gives us permission to participate and to be involved and to know, hey guys, this is an all of us experience.

So next we are going to dive into "Folk Parade".

Tell us a little bit about that.

- Yeah, the "Folk The Winter Parade" was like, so we basically, every winter, we kinda felt at the end of winter, there's this thing.

I mean, when you have crazy seasons like we do in Toronto, there's this moment where everyone just explodes into the streets with far too little clothing, even though it's still kind of cold.

But we're just like excited to get out there and do something, and we wanted to celebrate that.

And so we decided to just like to throw a parade, and it was a really impulsive decision the first time that we did it, which is kind of the thing about Lemon Bucket.

So we don't often have time to like apply for funding or like go get the street permits.

So we just go on our social media and we're like, "Hey, everybody, meet in the No-frills parking lot at this time and we're gonna go on a parade.

And then we got our friends from Samba Elegua to go down the street and do the same thing to all of their Facebook friends.

And so we had these two parades that started at different parking lots, but that at a time, a predetermined time bust out onto the street, takeover and then went to a third location where we had a surprise guest.

And this is kind of cool that like, just again, it's what you get to do when you're just flying by the seat of your pants.

We by fluke found out that the Reykjavik Workers Union Band had flown in from Iceland on a tour.

And they were staying at a hotel down the street where one of our members lived.

So we literally went to the hotel, staked out, sat in the lobby, wait until we saw a guy in a band uniform, went up to him and said, "Hey, we're Lemon Bucket.

And like, you probably don't know us, but I know you guys are here, and do you wanna play in front of like a thousand people in this park?

And all you gotta do is go there at three o'clock and wait."

And they said, yes and we brought them a carnival.

- Oh my gosh.

Awesome.

Let's go into "Folk Parade".

- I'm talking to everybody in the Freshco Parking lot, the Folk The Winter Parade surprising and lots of surprises for you.

Of course, we're called the Lemon Bucket Orkestra, and we're gonna lead this parade today.

The schedule for this evening.

(indistinct) (audience cheering) Seven o'clock and we're gonna start you off in a half an hour of (indistinct).

(audience cheering) And then at 7:30, we're gonna lead you to a secret location where we've got some special guests and keeping pretty good about keeping our mouths shut (indistinct) 'cause we're super, super excited.

This is a chance for us to kinda (indistinct).

Thanks again for joining us.

Let's get it started.

Yeah.

(audience cheering) (instrumental music) (band singing in foreign language) (instrumental music) (audience cheering) - Oh my gosh.

I'm so excited that we got to witness the parade, do follow Lemon Bucket through their social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube.

You don't wanna miss out on any of their updates or experience.

Now we have a special guest, your wife Marichka.

So let's welcome her to our like TV screen stage.

- To our couch.

- Oh, it's a nice to be a special guest.

- A special guest in your own home.

Welcome, Marichka.

- Oh thank you.

- What do you think of what we've done with the place?

- I don't know.

Looks familiar.

- So tell us about what we're going to get into.

We have both of you here.

What is this song that you're gonna be singing for us.

- Okay, so I don't want people to get the wrong idea that we're all chaos and like-- - Punk.

- Punk and celebration, which like, we love that, but we're also introspective and thoughtful and-- - And romantic.

- And romantic sometimes.

So we wanna sing a song that is more in that vein.

Like, we really love old songs and I'm talking like, not like was written in the 60s old, like 600 years old, old and-- - Old, old.

- Yeah, and this is a song, it's about a woman who's calling back to her years that are running away from her.

And she's calling back to them to return and they're running away faster and faster.

And so she calls the boys in the village to saddle the horses and to go chasing after the years.

And they actually catch them.

- Yeah.

- But the years when they're caught, they say, "No, sorry, you should've thought about us earlier."

- Wow.

And what is the name of this song?

I'm gonna let you say it 'cause I don't wanna butcher its title.

- Well, I mean, if we're gonna say it in Ukrainian, it's like, (Mark speaking in foreign language).

- That's usually like first line.

This is the name.

But it doesn't like, we'll rename it, I don't know, Youth.

Let's call it Youth.

- Or like Never Come Back.

- Or Never Come Back.

That's more dramatic.

- Yeah, I like dramatic.

- Yeah, let's get some drama.

- Yeah, we all love the drama.

So ladies and gentlemen, introducing.

(Mark singing in foreign language) (Both singing in foreign language) (Mark singing in foreign language) (Both singing in foreign language) (Mark singing in foreign language) (Both singing in foreign language) - Wow!

Yes.

Oh my gosh.

Your voices are so powerful.

I mean, how can you not feel something when you're singing?

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

- It's why we sing it in a basement.

- So introducing our next piece, "Counting Sheep", there's also story too about how you met.

And so let's get a little bit of that.

And what "Counting Sheep" is.

You have the floor.

- Well, I guess for those of you who are new to Lemon Bucket and to I guess us, to Mark and Marichka, we met, I guess, not that long ago in 2014 and-- - No, if we start to calculate, it's like already seven years.

- Yeah, I guess it is pretty long.

It feels like it was not that long ago, but I guess everybody says that who's been happily married, but we met in like pretty crazy circumstances.

It was the middle of the protests in Kiev that were later dubbed the Revolution of Dignity.

And we met in sub-zero temperature, literally under burning barricades while Marichka was singing a requiem, excuse me, for the first boys that were shot and killed at the hands of riot cops during those protests.

So the moment that we met was colored by that historical moment.

And of course things escalated and as they escalated, our relationship very quickly evolved from just having met to deciding we were gonna spend rest of our lives together.

I'd say probably in the matter of like weeks, maybe.

- A couple of weeks.

- 'Cause the crazy thing about those kinds of circumstances and anybody who's lived through that kind of thing can attest to, and everything just gets accelerated.

You tend to answer like skip the small talk and answer all the important questions.

So rather than like, oh, what's your favorite kind of cake?

There's like wee unanswered questions of like, okay, if there's a burning building in front of you and there's lots of people in it, do you go in or do you run away?

If there are people shooting from and you need to build a barricade to create something like to create a sort of safety for the people around you, do you do it or are you scared?

- You'll have only like a couple seconds to answer pretty much.

- And we know the answers to those questions about each other because of those circumstances.

So it was like, not too long before we were talking about kids, and other like more romantic things as well.

Yeah, one thing that was incredible about that situation is that eventually what happened is that it brought us together also as artists, we first sort of connected as human beings-- - That was about later.

- And in our curiosity of just like, did uncovering and sharing each other's sort of humanity.

And then we found out that we could sing together and then we had this sort of like love for traditional Ukrainian music, and ultimately decided after spending a lot of time volunteering, because of course the protests evolved into a revolution.

Revolution ended up annexation, annexation went to a war, that's still ongoing in Eastern Ukraine.

And after volunteering and going through a course to become combat medics, we ultimately ended up at the front under a commander who after hearing us sing on one of their shifts just said, listen, you guys carry in your voices, the entire history and story both past and present and future of our people don't throw it away because of a stray bullet.

And we thought about that, we took that to heart.

- (indistinct) But I understand.

Like now I understand more.

He was super right.

- It was at that moment that we decided that we would go to Canada and that we would work on "Counting Sheep", which was, it started off as, okay, let's just use the traditional music from Eastern Ukraine to tell the story of the revolution of what we went through.

And as we started doing that, we realized we can't just like sing a concert.

It feels too superficial or too just...

It didn't get to the heart of it.

It needed to be more experiential.

And so we later found out that what we created was immersive theater, even though we didn't have any theater background or know what we were doing, but apparently there's this thing called immersive theater that people really like where you get into it.

And so we built this show that we sung completely in Ukrainian polyphony, but the audience ate with us, drank with us, built barricades with us, celebrated, mourned, all the different parts of how our relationship evolved.

We sort of like, we brought people into that and the actors, the cast, the music was all the Lemon Bucket Orkestra.

It's actually how we met, how I met Lemon Bucket.

- That's right.

- Yeah.

- That's right.

- Wow.

So we are honored to introduce the theatrical promo video for "Counting Sheep.

Please watch.

(Marichka singing in foreign language) (band singing in foreign language) I just wanna thank you so much for sharing that story and what you went through and how art through this production, and I hope it comes back and we get to see it one day, if you're touring it.

I wanna be the first to know just how much art matters and just by your story, it's almost like this gentleman, this general like saved your life and through that, his life and the lives of others can continue to live on through their story that you've developed and through music.

So I just wanna thank you for living that, living your values, your belief, and through your art, because I can see, and I listen how intentional you are through your music.

So thank you both.

Thank you.

- Thank you.

Thank you so much.

And we actually met this guy later in Toronto, and we told him that he saved our life.

(indistinct) - Yeah.

And his response was like, "Yeah, I know".

(all laughing) - You know, it's almost a good story.

I'm glad he is alive.

He is still.

And I wonder that, and I'm sure others who were listening to this story are wondering if he's still with us.

So in just sharing that, that is a blessing.

So thank you.

- His code name is Bohama, which means Bohemian.

So it's very appropriate.

- He's an actor, of course.

- Very appropriate.

He's an actor.

But look, I mean, he knows as an actor, he knows that like how important the arts are.

I keep saying this, it's even though we were not deemed essential services by the powers that be throughout this whole process, I mean, I think everyone can attest to the fact, even in this pandemic, like how important art has been in various forms.

Of course, music is the one that's sort of like the most important for us.

And it's super crucial in generating empathy more than anything.

It allows us to like an access point into the things that we can't understand, because it doesn't demand logic.

It doesn't demand like understanding or some sort of rationality that we may not have matured to yet.

It's just an expression of what is at the moment So we're really lucky that that's something that we've been able to share over the years.

- Thank you so much.

- Oh, thank you.

I'm grateful.

I mean, one of the reasons you hear this attest to it, like the Levitt at the Falls, they're committed to celebrating diversity, bringing artists together from very diverse backgrounds and just like this, to share your stories.

So thank you, Levitt, for bringing us all together here for that today.

Well Marichka, are you leaving?

Okay.

Wait, come back.

I just wanna say thank you so much.

She's sneaking away, ladies and gentlemen, Marichka, you are beautiful.

Thank you so very much.

- Somebody's gotta go pick up the kids, right?

- Yes.

- Not everyone gets to be a rock star.

And that's me today.

- Marichka is beautiful.

Thank you for sharing your story.

Thank you for everything you give through your art.

I know that is not easy.

So we just wanna say, listen to these stories that Lemon Bucket Orchestra are sharing with us.

To learn more, to follow them, visit their website, www.lemonbucket.com.

Tell us about "Lemon-Aid".

The next thing we're about to watch.

- "Lemon-Aid" is probably the last like live show that Lemon Bucket did before the pandemic.

And it's fitting that it was a charity show.

It's something that's been important to us over the years, as to how we can give back to our community.

And so we decided it was around Christmas time.

It was like the holiday season.

And we wanted to bring together a whole bunch of artists.

And we had these conversations with everyone in our community about how often in the sort of holiday season as a musician, you're asked to support a lot of different causes and you're not very often asked like, well, what do you wanna support?

What do you wanna support with your art?

And we'll give you the platform to support that.

So we wanted to do that with Lemon Bucket.

Plan a festival where we invited some of our favorite bands in the city to play for what they care about.

And this song is recorded there.

So.

- Awesome.

Ladies and gentlemen, introducing "Lemon-Aid".

(band singing in foreign language) (audience cheering) Mark, thank you.

I love how I think as artists, we want our art to have life beyond ourselves.

We want it to mean something.

And with the opportunity you provided for yourself and others, to be able to give back to the things that truly matter to us.

I think you mentioned earlier, one of the reasons you're with us today, there was a grant also that you're working on.

Do you wanna give them a shout out as well for this opportunity.

- Oh my God, yeah, I definitely, I mean, we're getting down to the US thanks to the Arts Midwest, first of all, second of all, the Canada Council for the Arts, as well as I believe the Ontario Arts Council, so it's really important for us to acknowledge them and all the support that they've given us, not only in this tour, but over the years and how great they've been during the pandemic.

We're one of the lucky countries that has had like not... We haven't had a perfect run of course, but we're really lucky compared to other places in the world in terms of how our government has tried to step up, especially for artists, so we're very grateful.

- Yes.

We're very grateful.

And thank you Levitt for continuing to bring us.

We can't wait for it to welcome you here in the summer.

And that's gonna be very exciting.

What is something that we haven't talked about today?

We already delved so deeply into the heart and soul of your music.

What is one parting words you'd like to share with us as we wait in anticipation to welcome you to our city?

- I recently had a birthday and birthdays are these times when we tend to like reflect more, and I try to like boil it down to like three things that I kind of like have been feeling over the last year or so.

And I kinda boiled it down to gratitude, uncertainty, and hope.

Gratitude, you know, I've already sort of expressed and I can express even more.

It's not only about gratitude for people who give us something or give us opportunities, but gratitude just for the ability to get up and experience this amazing thing called life or this challenging thing called life.

I think we have to take a second, even when things are really difficult to really be thankful for the people that are around us, for the world that's around us, for the experience of life.

Uncertainty, we've all been feeling that.

Everybody in one way or another, and one thing that I remember thinking back to the circumstances that led to Marichka and I meeting is that real beauty and love can come out of uncertainty.

It's really important to remember that.

Our life, our four children, our continued expression of empathy and love through art, even throughout war, I think is a testament to that.

And I strongly believe that everybody can come out if you maybe embrace the uncertainty in certain times.

And then of course, hope.

And I think all of that shines through my elaboration on the first two points.

So I wanna leave everybody with a lot of hope for this year, for this summer, we can't wait to see you.

- Awesome.

I'm so grateful, Mark.

Thank you.

Gratitude, uncertainty and hope, ladies and gentlemen, let's take that with us.

And we wanna thank Lemon Bucket Orkestra for being with us today, do check out their website, www.lemonbucket.com.

And then of course be sure to follow Levitt Sioux Falls through our social media as well.

So Levitt Sioux Falls through Facebook and Instagram and learn more about all of our upcoming programming at levittsiouxfalls.org.

I just wanna thank again, our 2021 seasoned presenting sponsor, Sanford Health and "Levitt In Your Living Room" with SDPB sponsors, Dan and Arlene Kirby, we thank you so very much.

And of course, Mortimer & Mimi Levitt Foundation.

Do check them out again, levitt.org.

We appreciate you.

We thank you.

And remember, everyone, art matters, art is essential and it truly brings all of us together.

So do come and join us this summer because it is going to be just a revolution, a new revolution of community, unity and joy.

Again, like Mark said, gratitude, uncertainty, and hope.

We love you.

(audience cheering)