This excerpt from a film collage illustrates Ukrainian dance as used to express allegiance and identity with a nation or state. The film and the recorded dance events celebrate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Soviet Union. In some shots, we can see the Hopak, the national dance of Ukraine. In other shots, we see dancers dressed and dancing to represent specific ethnographic regions of Ukraine. This choreographic strategy is intended to invoke an image of the various parts of Ukraine joining in solidarity.

In later shots in the collage, we see dancers in a large sports stadium, representing various republics of the Soviet Union. In these sections, the dance can be seen as a national dance with the “nation” as the Soviet Union in general. All the different republics symbolically join in celebration and solidarity. In such choreographies, the Russian Republic was typically represented as the central and most important of them all.