Kurbas: 1920s avant-garde theatre in Ukraine. Public lecture by Virlana Tkacz and Waldemart Klyuzko
Date and time:
Wednesday 8 May, 2019
19:00 - 20:30
Location:
Main Hall of the Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family
21 Binney Street
London
W1K 5BQ
In the 1920s, director Les Kurbas radically transformed Ukrainian theatre, and was at the cutting edge of theatre innovations across Europe. Kurbas’s theatrical techniques focused on ‘making the invisible visible’; he experimented with movement, gesture, and new media such as photography and film, to produce unprecedented constructivist productions. Designs from his shows were shown in exhibits in Paris in 1925 and New York 1926, but like many of the individuals who worked with him, Kurbas perished in Stalin’s purges, and records of his work were lost to the world for decades.
Virlana Tkacz and Waldemart Klyuzko have co-curated seminal exhibitions on Kurbas and his productions in Kharkiv and Kyiv.
The event will be moderated by Maria Montague, Assistant Director, Ukrainian Institute London.
This event will be held in English.
£10 standard / £7 student
Speaker
Virlana Tkacz
Virlana Tkacz is an American theatre director of Ukrainian origin and the founding director of the Yara Arts Group at the off-Broadway La MaMa experimental theatre in New York. Since 1990, she has created 35 original theatre pieces that fuse fragments of poetry, songs, legends and history to create imagistic productions with narrative. Virlana is a world-renowned expert on Les Kurbas. Together with Klyuzko, she curated “Kurbas in Kharkiv” at Yermilov Center in Kharkiv and “Kurbas: New Worlds” at the Art Arsenal.
Speaker
Waldemart Klyuzko
Waldemart Klyuzko is an artist, photographer and videographer from Kyiv and a resident designer with Yara Arts Group. He has been a coordinator of the GogolFest International Contemporary Arts Festival since 2009. Since 2011 he has designed ten Yara Arts productions and was nominated for two New York Innovative Awards. His art includes: installations, photography, land art, street art, video art, performances and experiments with space.
