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Text Box: Above: Set to Berezil’s Hello, This Is Radio 477! photo by Waldemart Klyzuko Below: Julian Kytasty Photo by Waldemart Klyzuko

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Text Box: point perspective but were fragmentary planes similar to those used by Cubists and Supremacists. In four years the Berezil Artistic Association grew from a small workshop for young actors to the most active artistic organization in Ukraine with hundreds of participants who radically transformed the Ukrainian theatre. This section of the exhibition Kurbas: New Worlds concludes with Berezil’s participation in the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts in Paris (April-October 1925) and the International Theatre Exhibition in New York (February-March 1926). In 1926, Kurbas’s company became the Berezil National Theatre in Kharkiv, then the capital city of Ukraine. The second part of the exhibition focuses on three Berezil productions that present Kharkiv as the new urbanist center of Ukraine and reveal the tension between the old and new attitudes. We begin with Kurbas’s 1928 production of The People’s Malakhi in which the main element is the musicality of the language in the show. The second production, Hello, This Is Radio 477! (1929), imagined Kharkiv as a city in step with the latest trends in Europe. It was the first jazz musical revue in Ukraine and, at the same time, an entertaining critique of the old ways. Kurbas situated the third production, Myna Mazailo — Mykola Kulish’s 1929 comedy about urban stereotypes in Kharkiv — in a cosmic set that exposed the contradictions of the day and probed our relationship to time and hinted at the impact our

Text Box: Les Kurbas was an innovative director who staged experimental theatre pieces in Kyiv and Kharkiv during the 1920s, transforming the idea of what is theatre. He created new worlds on stage that invited his audiences to see the various layers of the present, review the past and imagine a new future. Kurbas: New Worlds examines what Les Kurbas actually did as a theatre director. It is presented in two sections. The first is devoted to Kurbas’s experimental work with his company the Berezil Artistic Association in Kyiv (1922-1925). The second features productions of the Berezil National Theatre in Kharkiv. In the Kyiv section we focus on three shows that addressed fundamental issues in world theatre. Kurbas’s innovative use of movement to abstract the bodies of the actors and create an exploding factory on stage is featured in his production of Georg Kaiser’s Gas(1923). In his next production, Jimmie Higgins (1923), Kurbas integrated film and stage action to present the thoughts of a character, revealing the inner and outer reality of a human being. Kurbas’s experiments with film made him one of the major artists at the source of multimedia in theatre. In his 1924 production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Kurbas had his actors enter the stage as themselves and become the characters in the play in front of the audience, emphasizing the dual nature of the body (person) on stage. Kurbas collaborated with designer Vadym Meller to create constructivist sets that resemble sculptures or art installations rather than typical theatre decor. These constructions formed complex, multilevel places for action that did not adhere to a single-

Text Box: daily decisions can have on the future. Kurbas hoped his theatre would transform the city and create a new urban culture but his dream was derailed by politics. The main task of this exhibition is to show the innovations that defined Kurbas’s work and made him one of the great experimental theatre directors of the first half of the 20th century. If you are interested in more information about the impact of Les Kurbas on theatre and the reception of his work in his own time and now, see Larissa
Babij’s impressions in “Kurbas in Kharkiv: Bringing Ukraine’s artistic heritage home.” (The Ukrainian Weekly; May 6, 2018.) Yara’s own story was recently featured in the second issue of a colorful new arts journal out of Virginia — The Ukrainian: Life and Culture. Virlana wrote her personal reflections on Yara’s 28-year journey in “Yara Arts Group: Dreaming Wide-Awake.” (The Ukrainian: Life and Culture. Vol 1, no 2, 2018.) The magazine, edited by Inna Golovakha, also features articles on the 108-year-old Hutsul Theatre, young urban painters in Ukraine, the best Ukrainian films of 2017, the Kyiv Underground, painter Roman Minin from Donetsk, Ukrainian children’s books, the Ivan Honchar Museum, Igor Sikorsky—Ukrainian American aviation pioneer and “What Have Ukrainians Been Drinking All These Years?”