KURBAS: 1920s Avant-Garde Theatre in Ukraine (2019)

May 9, 2019

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Cambridge Ukrainian Studies invites you to join us for the Ninth Annual Vsesvit Evening dedicated to Les Kurbas, Ukraine’s most important theatre director whose work formed part of the Soviet avant-garde movement of the 1920s and 1930. The event (5.30, 9 MAY in RAMSDEN ROOM, ST CATHERINE'S COLLEGE, Cambridge) will feature Virlana Tkacz (NYC), theatre director, founder of the New York City Yara Arts Group, cultural historian, curator, author and translator, as well as Waldemart Klyuzko (Kyiv), artist, designer and curator, who has been nominated for two New York Innovative Awards for his work with the Yara Arts Group. Together Virlana Tkacz and Waldemart Klyuzko co-curated two major exhibitions in Ukraine on Les Kurbas. 

Kurbas founded Berezil' (March – the beginning of spring), a large-scale theatre and art association that took the form of an experimental collective composed of the brightest, most talented and innovatively courageous young actors, artists, musicians, producers and technicians of the time. Kurbas’ innovative theatrical methods fused psychology with new media, such as photography and film, to produce unprecedented constructivist stagings that revolutionised theatre. Like many of the individuals who worked with him, Kurbas (d. 1937) perished in Stalin’s purges. Please join us for this extraordinary evening. Registration will open shortly.

The Annual Cambridge Vsesvit Evening was begun in 2011 to celebrate the art of literary translation and the mission of the journal Vsesvit (The Universe), the oldest active literary journal in Ukraine. Founded in 1925 by Oleksandr Dovzhenko, Vasyl’ Blakytnyi, and Mykola Khvyl’ovyi, the journal has translated over 4,000 works from 98 literatures of the world into the Ukrainian language.