Staging the Ukrainian Avant-Garde in the 1910s and 1920s

As he comments on contemporary times through a historic perspective, Petrytsky sets up an aesthetic pendulum between the chromatic pathos of Expressionism and the staid objectivity of Constructivism.

Anatol Petrytsky`s designs for the satirical parody of Mykola Hohol`s (Nikolai Gogol`s) Vii relays – through dark colors, rich facture, and sweeping brushstrokes – the animistic ethos of Ukrainian folk beliefs in sorcerers and spirits.

The monumentality of the figures filling the space derives from medieval frescoes, which abound in Ukrainian ecclesiastical architecture (the setting of Gogol `s mystical short story) of the 12th through 16th centuries. The energetic disposition of Petrytsky`s figures also recalls vivacious Baroque character of the Cossack period of the 17th century.

Vadym Meller’s renderings for Juliush Slowacki`s Mazepa capture in Cubo-Futurist shifts of volumentic form the conflicted rule of the Ukrainian Cossack Hetman, whose power came to a tragic end in 1709 at the Battle of Poltava.

Reviving the cultural traditions of medieval Ukraine, Anatol Petrytsky exploits the flat, rhythmic conventions of ancient icon-painting to render the characters of modern playwright Lesia Ukrainka.

Kost Yeleva utilized fluid linearity in a rounded sculptural way, to staunchly define the variant characters of contemporary French social drama as a modern-day parallel to the freedom-fighting Cossacks of the 17th and 18th centuries.

Here she explored a new language of dance based on what she called “choreographic sketches” - a deconstructed analysis of movement inspired by Italian Futurist painting and annotated by diagrams of compounded arcs and the repetition of curved and angled lines.

Alexandra Exter and Vadym Meller`s costume designs were sympathetically allied to Nijinska`s rhythmical organization and dynamic Futurist expression, while the whimsical Anatol Petrytsky imbued the human form in motion with Constructivast accents and tactility. By the end of 1920s, Petrytsky`s designs for the ballet Red Poppy show a filtering of Cubist collage and applique of various materials.

Similarly, Olexandr Khvostenko-Khvostov combines Futurist dynamism with Constructivist precision in his animated designs for both ballet and opera.

Drawing on the bawdiness of Cossack lore, Petrytsky`s dwarf, puppet-like representations of the magnanimous medieval characters from Alexander Borodan`s opera Pince Ihor (Igor) create a sharp artistic contrast between the epic and the vulgar. Here, the stately, princely features of Kyivan-Rus clash with barbaric forces in the production, epitomized by the scandalous frenzied dance of the Polovtsian captors.

Petrytsky`s designs daringly juxtapose the opposing values of the rugged and the refined, the ludicrous and the lofty, and synthesize them into a new expressive totality. Turning to different sources, the realm of circus and comedy – Boris Kosarev combines the exaggerated colors of carnival and the make-up of street perfomers to provide for visceral experience of the magical, the fantastic, and the ludic, culminating in a startling new effect on the stage.

Together with those of Vadym Meller, Shyfrin’s works were shown of the international Exhibition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Arts in Paris in 1925 (where Meller was awarded a gold medal).

Kurbas`s enthusiasm for the conventionality of the Japanese Noh and Kabuki theaters and his catholic taste in dramaturgy - from Somerset Maugham and Schiller to Fernando Crommelink and Gilbert with Sullivan – gave his own designers and especially, the versatile Meller, occasion in work in a new style, filtered through the principles of expressionism and revised toward the less rigors of constructivism.

State Jewish Theater in Kharkiv, drew on the integrated sources in of Kurbas`s theater productions. The directors interest to the distinctive character of modern painting and abrupt offensive aspects of popular culture, being specifically keen on the manner of the model actor Charlie Chaplin, imbued the Beresil with a richly divergent, universal character.

As an artistic association, Berezil was based on a network of studios, a director`s laboratory, and a stage model workshop led by Vadym Meller.

He was assisted by Meller protégée Maia (Mylytsia) Symashkevych. Meller`s training in the West, his participation in Paris exhibitions in the 1910s and his association with modernist groups such as Der Blaue Reiter set him on an early path toward innovatively modern artistic expression. His collaboration with Nijinska and Exter (as seen in the adjacent gallery) infused his conceptions with dynamic movement, structure, and physicality.

His stage sets for the productions of Georg Kaiser`s and Upton Sinclair`s Jimmie Higgins belie an innate understanding of Cotstructivist organization of space effected through minimalist means. Like modernist paintings, Berezil productions were designed to challenge the spectator by turning away from an imitative to a metonymic mode of representation .

Laying bare stagecraft the way that abstract painting abandons all illusionism in representation, Berezil`s anti-naturalism insisted on exposing the component parts of the production and giving their theatricality equal weight.