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Tetiana Rudenko,
Curator of the Museum of Theater, Music and Cinema of Ukraine
Typically, the research focus on theatrical costume is overly isolated. Stage costume is considered as a separate type of graphics. Instead, theatrical costume is a component of the synthetic art of theater. Its avant-garde dimension is quite difficult to understand outside of more general processes not only in artistic culture, but also in society as a whole. Thus, the study of theatrical costume should be based on contextualization. Perhaps, the best methodology is implemented within the framework of the museum-curatorial approach. It is from this perspective that the theatrical costume will be considered in this article.
At first glance, the very phenomenon of theatrical costume is extremely simple, since theatrical costume has two fundamental functions: a means of transforming the actor and identifying the character. This can only be satisfied with a primitive view of theater itself as a source of entertainment. However, in Ukrainian realities, its socio-political function prevailed.
The art of Ukrainian theater was forever changed by the innovative ideas of Les Kurbas (1887–1937). The first formation he led, the Young Theater, was tasked with intensifying the introduction of advanced European performative practices. The mission of the Berezil Artistic Association was more ambitious. With its help, Kurbas sought a total renewal of theater culture and the formation of a professional community capable of reform. In addition, the theatre was to contribute to the modernization of Ukrainian society. In the Young Theater, Anatol Petrytskyi (1895–1964) was the main artist who embodied the ideas of new directing based on the models of world drama. At the Berezil Artistic Association, Vadym Meller (1884–1962) was an ideologist of the modernization of the visual language and style of theater. These two artists became true leaders of the innovative transformation of Ukrainian theater in the 1910s and 1920s.
The Berezil period of Vadym Meller’s work was preceded by his collaboration with Bronislava Nijinska at the School of Movement in Kyiv in 1919. On the way to implementing conceptual reforms, the choreographer sought to create an original dance theater that could overcome the limitations imposed by classical ballet. Movement was to become the dominant component of the choreographic work: music, stage design, and dramatic action.
Combining creativity and teaching at the School of Movement, Vadym Meller created a series of sketches — visualizations of the Nijinska method. In these, in fact, his first theatrical works, the artist managed to convey a complex interaction of laconic geometric forms of costumes with the avant-garde dynamics of the dancer’s body through a cubic-futuristic style.
It is difficult to find another set designer who has so consistently developed and explored the practices of expressive costume for movement. From 1920 to 1923, Meller worked at the futuristic Art of Performance Theater, where he designed, among other things, the productions of The Sky Is Burning and Carnival. The theater worked under the direction of director Mark Tereshchenko (1894–1982) using the method of collective creativity. In The Sky Is Burning (based on the lyrics of futurist poets), Meller designed the costumes and movements, depicting the masses as a new subject of social and political reality. That is why the costumes were unified. Men and women wore the same outfit, which made them equal in the struggle. The idea from the sketch was interestingly embodied in the costume: a tunic with an asymmetrical cut, where the shape is complicated by layering of geometric details. The tunic and helmet are hand-painted to match the red gradients in the artist’s drawing. All these expressive means of transformation, combined with stage movements, created the illusion of fire.
It should also be mentioned that there was no additional decoration of the space. The scenography was formed by a plastic form of bodies wrapped in stage clothes. In the composition The Sky Is Burning, the new role of costume on stage is already noticeable. A costume-sign, a costume that is a full-fledged and, sometimes, the leading expressive tool in an impersonal acting ensemble.
It is also worth adding that the surviving photographs from The Sky Is Burning show that Vadym Meller chose the seventeenth-century work The Oath of Horace by Jacques-Louis David as a reference for costumes and movements. Thus, it becomes clear that the complex construction of the costume is an allusion to ancient clothing, and the conical headdress represents a helmet. But from now on, the crowd becomes the character.
The Berezil Art Association (Kyiv, 1922–1926) played an important role in the early 1920s as a center where the avant-garde found reliable institutional foundations. Les Kurbas, the artistic director of the association and its chief director, developed the idea of theater as a universal synergistic artistic medium. In Kurbas, Meller found the collaborator he had been looking for.
The premiere of the play Gas by the expressionist Georg Kaiser took place on the stage of the First Theater Workshop of Berezil in April 1923. The audience was thrilled by the innovation of the production. Les Kurbas gave a mechanistic character to the actor’s physicality: thirty performers imitated the coordinated movements of machines and people — the cogs of a misanthropic system. Vadym Meller’s idea was embodied in a three-dimensional metal installation, which was radically different from the traditional flat backdrop. Each costume within the stage structure was a separate manifestation.
Miller’s theatrical costumes for Gas accumulate conceptually charged visual solutions (ill. 2, ill. 24, ill. 25). The costume of the Black Master, a tailcoat, an obligatory attribute of the rich man of the time — the lord of the masses — over which a skeleton was revealed, carries additional meanings, namely, a mortal danger not only for the ruling class, but also for society as a whole.
Білі вертикальні вставки вздовж всієї фігури під час руху змушували персонажів до своєрідного танцю смерті. Макабричність художнього рішення також підкреслювали контури черепа можновладця, який візуалізувався завдяки чергуванню кольорів крізь циліндр. Таким чином, Меллер розвинув виражальні засоби, початок яким було покладено у Школі рухів Ніжинської.
The white vertical inserts along the entire figure forced the characters to perform a kind of dance of death while moving. The macabre nature of the artistic solution was also emphasized by the contours of the ruler’s skull, which was visualized by alternating colors through the cylinder. Thus, Meller developed the expressive means that had their origins in Nijinska’s School of Movement.
Meller faced a new challenge during Les Kurbas’s 1924 production of Macbeth. The director set out to actually break the play down into its components to reveal the technology of the theatrical process. To teach the actor to capture the moment of transformation, in order to quickly get into the role. The viewer, as an important actor in the process, also had to switch: to dive in and out of the moment of action. The actors in costumes and make-up appeared on stage as if they were just appearing on a daily basis. Only when the lights came on did they instantly enter the character, forcing the viewer to work intensively with their imagination. According to V. Vasylko’s memoirs, this spectacle had a special impact on experienced theatergoers. In particular, L. Starytska-Cherniakhivska would from time to time quietly crossed herself in the middle of the action out of tension. A creative experiment during the staging of Macbeth revealed the thesis that a theatrical costume outside of the action is only a decorative thing.
Due to the lack of sufficient funding, an unexpected and seemingly simple decision was made to abandon the original stage costume and borrow props from the far from avant-garde Solovtsov Theater. However, it turned out that the transformation was impossible without a relevant stage outfit: the actor’s body seemed to be hovering between everyday life and the game. So, the actors had to be provided with costumes designed by Meller right before they went on stage. This meant that in avant-garde scenography, costume reduction was impossible.
Despite the fact that Meller taught scenography at the Kyiv Art Institute, created a scenography workshop on the basis of Berezil art association, and his students, including M. Symashkevych, V. Shkliaiv, D. Vlasiuk, and Y. Tovbin, became successful artists, he failed to pass on the avant-garde impulse to his successors for decades to come. There was a deadly need to adhere to the Soviet socialist realist canon, which made any experiments impossible. The totalitarian system forced avant-garde artists to self-annihilate, provoking the oblivion of their work. That is why it is important to reconstruct the originality of their contribution in order to comprehend the diversity of potential directions of artistic development of contemporary stage designers.
Одним із ключових митців, що зробили внесок у розвиток авангардного театрального костюма, був Анатоль Петрицький. Вперше як сценограф-новатор він заявив про себе в Молодому театрі (Київ, 1917–1919). Петрицький вважав своїм завданням модернізувати більш архаїчні мистецькі форми. Обізнаність художника зі спадщиною, зокрема, завдяки навчанню у Василя Кричевського, постійно підживлювала його авангардну винахідливість.
Anatol Petrytskyi was one of the key artists who contributed to the development of avant-garde theater costume. He first made his name as an innovative set designer at the Young Theater (Kyiv, 1917–1919). Petrytskyi considered it to be his task to modernize more archaic art forms. The artist’s awareness of his heritage, in particular through his studies with Vasyl Krychevskyi, constantly fueled his avant-garde inventiveness.
Petrytskyi’s works for Lesia Ukrainka’s play The Stone Host at the First State Shevchenko Theater (directed by Oleksandr Zaharov, 1921) are also interesting. The Theater Museum presents a series of sketches of scenery and costumes, as well as two original dresses from this performance for the characters of Donna Sol and Donna Anna. Donna Sol’s costume (ill. 34, ill. 35) is made of sackcloth, a plain fabric (typical of the lower classes), there is a sunflower image on it (referring to Lesya Ukrainka’s text). Donna Anna’s dress (ill. 32, ill. 33) is made of burlap and buckram. It also has a glue paint pattern, which was most likely made by Petrytskyi himself. The dress of a wealthy Spanish woman features variants of the swarga ornament instead of family coats of arms. The artist also depicted a dragon, a lion and a griffin in a stylized manner. The latter seems to be borrowed from the Scythian animal style. Thus, there is nothing left of the usual courtly image of Spanish ladies but modern interpretations of Ukrainian artists.
In 1925, Petrytskyi was engaged by the director Hnat Yura to create a modernized theatrical interpretation of The Viy by M. Gogol, with a text by Ostap Vyshnia. In this way, contemporary events, such as Ukrainization, the fight against moonshiners, etc., were woven into the fabric of the performance. The gallery of expressive costumes for The Viy by Petrytskyi demonstrates a rich palette of avant-garde ideas inspired by Ukrainian and world heritage. Among them are Adam and Eve, the Angel and God the Father, who experience a folk emanation. Characteristic in this regard is the image of Nanny (ill. 36, ill. 37), which corresponds to the portrait of Feodosia Paliy by an unknown author. The figure of the Sotnyk in Petrytskyi’s (ill. 3) avant-garde performance refers to the modern embodiment of this visual image in Viy, created by Ivan Buriachok (ill. 4) for the 1914 production at the Sadovsky Theater. Ivan Buriachok’s skill as a theater artist was an eclectic combination of two elements: the mystical and fairy-tale and the historical. Petrytskyi saw his mission in the avant-garde modernization of Ukrainian art, which did not imply rejecting the achievements of his predecessors. The artist believed that only by living the experience of earlier artists, which was manifested in direct mimesis, could one reach the next evolutionary stage of artistic culture.
Petrytskyi managed to make the most radical revolution in one of the most conservative genres, opera. In this sense, it was much more difficult for him than for Meller. The latter managed to find like-minded people. Petrytskyi, on the other hand, sought to overcome the reactionary artistic resistance on his own. The artist’s skill was not only in creating sketches, which in his performance acquired the status of independent avant-garde works. Petrytskyi had a talent for achieving an accurate stage embodiment of his works, not being satisfied with his achievements on paper. This is evidenced by photographs from the performances (unfortunately, in black and white), and memoirs according to which the artist persuaded the authors to go on stage wearing all the elements provided for. During the performances, Petrytskyi was usually backstage or in the audience, checking the implementation of the smallest details. During the radio broadcast of the opera Kupalo, everyone in Kharkiv could hear the artist’s sharp-edged instructions. Anatol Petrytskyi tried to penetrate deeply into every element that makes up the performative synergy. In particular, he spent hours listening to the music for the opera production he was to design. This allowed the artist to turn costumes and scenography into an expressive tool that not only passively shaded the music, acting, and plot twists. Petrytskyi was one of those who brought stage design closer to the level of a separate synthetic genre of art.
After the period of repression and the World War, the historical avant-garde finally ceased to exist. However, this had far-reaching consequences for the development of scenography and, especially, theatrical costume. Since the 1950s, there has been a rapid involution of performative costume. It no longer carries any complex, meaningful messages, acquiring either attractive attributes or slipping into the status of a “face” that does not even help the actor to transform, but rather signals to the viewer that he or she is at a performance. In the end, quite naturally, contemporary theater costume has sometimes become an expression of aggressive, vulgar naturalism. This provokes those artists who position themselves as experimenters to wear costumes on stage only to take them off during the performance, revealing their artistic intentions and entertaining the audience.
An important implication of the representation of the phenomenon of theatrical costume presented here is that an avant-garde artist who wants to create something truly new in art cannot be trained through craftsmanship. Every artist who wants to be innovative has to establish his or her own personal connection with the artistic heritage. Therefore, the improvement of educational practices in the field of stage design requires the integration of in-depth work with heritage into the didactic process, which, in particular, is provided by the Theater Museum.
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