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T rilogy: Light From the East Introduction In the summer of 1991, a troupe of actors and actresses traveled from New York City to Ukraine to embark on a joint venture with actors and actresses in a part of the Soviet Empire that the Western world new little about. They were a heterogeneous group of young people hoping to showcase a production in which the past and the present were interwoven in an artistic whole through the collaborative endeavor of people from distinct cultures and backgrounds—East meeting West in a piece based on the diary of a Ukrainian theater director named Les Kurbas. Previously performed in the United States, A Light From the East would be transformed in many ways to accommodate new audiences and multicultural and multilingual dynamics. For its Ukrainian debut, it was renamed In the Light. History would play a role in changing its tone and substance. Among those traveling to Ukraine that summer was a young woman named Amy Grappell, and among the historical events that overtook the performers and the performance was a political upheaval that shook the world. The juxtaposition of life and art took on a drama of its own, one that no one had anticipated. And from this unexpected turn of events emerged a film. Written and directed by Ms. Grappell, Light From the East is story within a story within a story—a 72 minute glimpse of repression, revolution, and resurrection. It is a story that blends the theater of the stage with the theater of life. The film evolves as an exploration of innocents abroad caught up in a political coup. It deals with a time and place that presaged the collapse of the Soviet Union and birth of a new nation. Both the play and the documentary film are rooted in the history of Ukraine in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly in the history of a man whose life and work were cut short by a regime jealously guarding its power to dictate what could be said or seen or thought, whether on stage or off. An exploration of the events and the people and art that are an indivisible trilogy of this story must begin with the past—with the life and times of Les Kurbas. Les Kurbas Les Kurbas was the Ukrainian theater di rector who created the Berezil Artistic Association in 1922. During the eleven years of its existence, Berezil was one of the most exciting and revolu tionary theatrer in Europe, and Kurbas, one of the most innovative directors of his time. At the very center of the renaissance in arts and literature in Soviet Ukraine during the 1920s, Kurbas supported the creation of a new, urban Ukrainian culture that would be a part of contemporary world culture. Born in Western Ukraine, then a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Kurbas was educated at the University of Vienna. He loved the new art theater of Europe which emerged in the first decades of this century and enthusiastically em braced new theories that urged artists to reject realism and look beyond the imitation of life on stage to the possibility of creating images which conveyed the spirit, the essence of a moment. When he arrived in Kyiv in 1916, Kurbas could clearly see how a century of tsarist censorship had distorted Ukrainian theater. In the 19th century, the tsar had issued a series of ukases that limited Ukrainian plays to folk comedies and village melodramas. Only peasant characters were allowed to speak Ukrainian on stage. Many troupes peddled what were called "hopakiadas" in which the port rayals of Ukrainians were limited to happy, singing peasants, usually drunk, who danced the "hopak" every few minutes. Even the best intentioned theaters were influenced by the prevailing dis criminatory attitudes towards Ukrainians. But Kyiv was also on the verge of a revolution in Ukrainian consciousness. The dramatic changes of the next few years would allow Kurbas to reshape Ukrainian theater. With the fall of the tsar in 1917, censorship was abolished. For the first time, Ukrainian theater could develop without legal restrictions. At first Kurbas began to stage world classics in Ukrainian. Later he began to experiment with poetry on stage. Critics called Kurbas's staging of poetry the first attempt at abstract theater. Under Kurbas’s direction, Berezil’s set de sign exhibit won the gold medal at the International Exposition of Decorative Arts in Paris in 1925. In Видання C оюзу Українок A мерики - перевидано в електронному форматі в 2012 році . A рхів C У A - Ню Йорк , Н . Й . C Ш A.
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