Same War, Different Sand.

In 1953, this was pretty hot.



Hell, 56 years later it's still pretty hot.

Love during wartime, Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster, swelling violins, crashing waves. It's got to be one of the most dramatic scenes ever captured in the sand.

Until now.

Take 8 minutes and 33 seconds out of your life to watch a drama of an entirely different kind unfold in the sand.



I'd never heard of sand animation, and I'd never seen anything like this, at least not created live as a performance.

The artist, Kseniya Simonova, performs this piece on the finale of "Ukraine's Got Talent". Yes, there really is a "Ukraine's Got Talent", and Kseniya Simonova is 2009's winner. The piece depicts the loss and devastation of the Ukraine during World War II, where almost one out of every four Ukrainians lost their lives. It is clearly a deeply emotional topic for this nation, as many in the audience who would not be born until twenty, thirty or even forty years after this conflict are moved to tears by the love and loss depicted in Simonova's work.

Simonova herself proves a dramatic performer. Her "brushstrokes" are swift, sure, and precise. This 24 year old tosses handfuls of her medium with gusto and bravado, an Itshak Perlman of beach sand.

Oh yeah, it also doesn't hurt that she is smoking hot.



Here's another performance she gave during an earlier round of the show. I've since viewed other sand animators on You Tube and the Internet but to be honest, they seem like amateurs compared to Simonova.

This is unique. It is true performance art on every level... the performance itself is artistic, invoking an uncommon talent that creates and re-create a canvas every moment, one scene morphing to another before our eyes. The routine is painstakingly choreographed and rehearsed, images and actions timed precisely to the music. And of course the images themselves are art, the same but different every time.

The constraints of the choreography make this all the more artistic, to me anyway. Simonova is a soloist playing in a different medium. She's not making it up as she goes. She can no more change the pictures in her routine than Perlman or Yo-Yo Ma can change the notes in a Mendelssohn concerto. Lots of people can play a Mendelssohn concerto, very few can play it like Perlman or Yo-Yo Ma.

Lots of people can draw pictures in the sand. Very few can draw them like Kseniya Simonova.