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1926, photos from Berezil productions were included in the acclaimed International Theatre Exposition in New York. The list of the organizers of this exhibit included such important American theater artists as Eugene O'Neill. Les Kurbas believed that theater was a powerful instrument that could captivate and influence audiences with ideas that could inspire and motivate great passions and great deeds. Unfortunately, the same belief led to conflicts with Soviet authorities who were adamantly opposed to theatrical productions that deviated from the universally prescribed Soviet realism. Kurbas epitomized the creative spirit that rebelled against that prescription and suffered the consequences. In October 1933, he was dismissed from his post of director of Berezil. In December, he was arrested, tried, and convicted as a counter-revolutionary nationalist. He was sentenced to imprisonment in the Solovets Islands and murdered in 1937 during a Stalinist purge. A Light From the East: Yara Arts Group Following in the footsteps of Les Kurbas is a Ukrainian American woman named Virlana Tkacz. The founder of the Yara Arts Group (1990), Ms. Tkacz is a creative theater director who believes, as did Kurbas, that good theater engages and captivates an audience and forbids passive viewing. Ms. Tkacz’s A Light From the East, based on Kurbas’s diary, blends drama and poetry in a manner reminiscent of Kurbas’s own experiments. Originally produced in the United States, the play was taken on the road to Ukraine in 1991. At the time, no one could have foreseen the historic events that overtook the cast and crew while they were preparing and rehearsing for their Kyiv debut. Ms. Tkacz’s observations on these events are illuminating: “I had set out to explore Kurbas's dream of creating a new world on stage, and here I was bringing that dream to life in Kiev. I had assembled a very diverse group of artists and created with them a new theater piece about the dream of creating such a piece. We were actually doing what so many people had only dreamt about. That evening I didn't realize how soon I, too, would be plunged into the nightmare of history that surrounds this dream.” One morning, after a long and complex night of rehearsing and refining the performance to accommodate new actors and new concepts while trying to smooth language barriers, Virlana Tkacz received a call telling her there had been a coup. “We had always wondered how Kurbas could concentrate on theater in 1921 during the civil war. There was even a line in the play—‘How do you do theatre during the war, when people are dying all around?’ That morning I understood that we had stumbled onto the right answer: You do what you have to do. Of course, we would have to continue with our technical rehearsals. We had a show to open. At the same time the political events had a major impact on our piece. They totally changed the way historical events we portrayed were perceived by the audience. Certain sections of our text acquired new significance. Lines such as: ‘Get up— a new government has taken the town,’ were now electrifying.” “Our production of A Light From the East centered on the point in Kurbas's work when he turned from staging classical dramatic texts and started to experiment with poetry on stage. As part of our piece we used actual entries from Kurbas's diary, excerpts from his actors' memoirs, and newspaper articles of the time. Our production focused on a journey into the provinces Kurbas undertook with his actors in 1920.” “The framing device for A Light From the East was a slide lecture on Les Kurbas, which introduces the audience to the topic. The lecture is overwhelmed by the recitation of the twelve invasions of Kiev between 1917 to 1921, which devastated the city . . . the present and the past constantly shift in the piece. Parallels are drawn, slip away and then become visible again. The dreams of today's young actors are included in text, and provide a future for Kurbas's dreams from the past. For our production in Ukraine we were also able to include an actual voice from the past, the voice of Roman Cherkashyn, the only actor still alive who had worked with Kurbas.” “7n the Light (the title used in Ukraine) opened at the Franko National Theatre in Kiev, considered the most important theatre in Ukraine. It was also a space Kurbas had worked in during the 1920s. . . . Our opening was also surrounded by major historical events. We started previews the day the coup collapsed and opened the day Ukraine
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