.png)
Diana Klochko,
Art Critic, Essayist, Public Lecturer
In Ukrainian culture, the history of the emancipation of the theatrical costume sketch towards the self-sufficiency of the artistic image begins with the first experiments of Oleksandra Ekster, which she started in Kyiv during the First World War.
For the stage performance of Innokenty Annenskyi’s play Famira Kifared in 1916, she used a combination of innovations of contemporary dance with ancient connotations, when the nakedness of the athletic body emphasizes movement. The bodies of the Bacchae in Ekster’s interpretation were muscular, with elongated limbs and small breasts. In contrast to the sexualized images of Leon Bakst, the artist depicted athletic bodies in an unrestrained rhythm of running, which is enhanced by numerous colorful shawls, like slithering snakes (ill. 1).
Ekster gave the shawls a different visual meaning from that of Bakst’s sketches and Isadora Duncan’s costumes — they became flying ribbons encircling an almost naked body. They do not cover individual parts of the bodies, but create a bright swirl around them, like in traditional wreaths, they flutter around girls’ heads and waists when they rotate quickly.
Ekster was well aware of Ukrainian rural costume, at least in the central region, and used field observations to depict the body as a kinetic system. Her bacchantes are sharp in their movements, wearing some kind of shorts and bustiers, and the make-up of their faces and limbs is similar to the decorative elements of female figures of Trypillia-Cucuteni culture. For the background of the sketches, Ekster chose a rich indigo color, which combines the peasant paintings of Right-bank Ukraine with the archaic ancient cities of the Northern Black Sea. The introduction of a saturated background into a stage sketch was an avant-garde technique, as it made the sheet an autonomous image that could be shown as a separate work, regardless of the performance. She probably used this technique in solidarity with the exhibition works of Hanna Sobachko, who in the same years created fantasy floral compositions on a pink and deep blue background.
Ekster’s innovative imagery was based on local visual material. She proved to be important primarily for Kyiv stage designers, her students and colleagues Vadym Meller and Anatol Petrytskyi.
In 1918, Ekster opened the Workshop School in Kyiv, later renamed the Studio, where she practiced modernist composition and color studies based on dynamics, movement, decorative color, minimization of details, and abstraction.
Vadym Meller was among those who attended her Studio, although before that, he had already had the experience of communicating in Munich with Paul Klee and studying in Paris with Antoine Bourdelle. From 1915, he worked extensively in Kyiv with Bronislava Nijinska, who opened her ballet school (and the talent of Serge Lifar) there. Miller’s stage design innovations were based on the principles of geometric fragments, proportions and costume design, where the depiction of the body and face was minimal in comparison to the dynamics of the costume.
From about 1920 onwards, form and color in his sketches are dominated by a combination of surfaces with maximum use of geometric effect. Sometimes he allowed himself a specific humor in relation to the classical heritage, which is probably why the costumes are mostly related to the teatro dell’arte: Harlequin and Columbine were dressed in robes made of multi-colored and multi-textured diamonds or triangles. The images of Pierrot and Harlequin became especially relevant in the fin de siècle, and in this context, it is worth mentioning the “black Pierrot” by Alexander Vertinskyi, whose stage career unfolded in Ukrainian cities from 1917. Meller’s sharp eye, trained in Cubist deconstruction, used fashion images for his sketches, transforming geometric patches of both contrasting and converging (but always bright) colors. Movement on the verge of the physically possible, the expression of a gutta-percha body, the face as a remnant of a cloak and make-up — Meller enhances the visual expression of the costume itself even in unfinished sketches. The costume becomes a character.
Anatol Petrytskyi studied with Fedir and Vasyl Krychevskyi, Oleksandr Murashko, Mykhailo Boichuk, and at the Ekster studio, so his sketches of stage costumes of the 1920s show traces of their influences. He also consulted Danylo Shcherbakivskyi about the costumes of Cossack officers, but the main thing in his stage search is not so much historical accuracy as irony, grotesque and caricature of the costume as a distinguishing the character. In numerous theatrical projects by Petrytskyi until the 1930s, the actor’s stage image would be determined by the silhouette, color, and bodily features of the characters. In Petrytskyi’s graphic sheets, the artistry of the characters could be eccentric, comic, exotic, and even vulgar. He turned the Devil and Death (ill. 2) for Ostap Vyshnia’s Viy into eccentrics that the viewer wouldn’t be afraid of, as the artist was not afraid to play with shades of black.
Petrytskyi worked on caricatures for Ellan-Blakytnyi’s Red Pepper, received commissions to illustrate texts and books by his friends, and in 1931 was the first in the history of European modernism to create what we now call an author’s artbook of his own interpretations of the folk costume. His album Theater Costumes showed how elements of peasant and historical (mostly Cossack era) Ukrainian costumes became the basis for innovative images. Petrytskyi’s characters — insidious, defenseless, arrogant, funny, surprised or restrained — are organic in their physicality and portraits. The artist played with obesity or fragility, sportiness or buxomness as an essential component of the artistic image, working as a couturier in some designs. To enhance the contrast and texture, he collages, mixing clippings of different newspapers into font compositions, combining multi-colored foil, craft paper, pieces of printed fabrics with thin contours made in ink and large gouache shapes.
Alla Horska “looked up” the character’s characterization through caricature of physicality in Petrytskyi’s modernist sketches. A professional artist, she decided to study grotesque imagery on her own, copying Petrytskyi’s semi-banned sketches of the avant-garde period (which was not yet distinguished terminologically). Horska could freely study the contemporary posters and costumes of Virskyi’s ensemble created by the artist, but she preferred the innovative designs of the Petrytskyi’s period, which was not shackled by the dogmatism of ideology, when the purge for the doctrine of “social realism” had not yet begun.
She was interested in artistic exaggeration, playing with shapes and the major sound of color contrasts, which is evident in her 1962–63 work on the set design for M. Kulish’s comedy How Huska Died (ill. 3). Horska uses lettering, dresses pious women in black headscarves and seductive black stockings with pointed shoes, ties their figures with a rosary, and pins giant boas and peacock feathers to their hats, alluding to the times of the NEP and jazz. In her sketches of costumes, she combines crosses and silhouettes of the “little black dress” of contemporary fashionistas in silhouette and proportion, mixes buffonade outlines with floral ornaments of towels — it seems that she even “pixelates” some motifs from traditional embroideries.
The sketches for this comedy were a discovery of the great possibilities of convention, including the unrestrained swelling of corporeality that Petrytskyi used so brilliantly. Horska was attracted to the playful attitude to eroticism. Petrytskyi knew how to use geometric shapes to show the seductiveness of the breast or the naked abdomen, the lushness of the buttocks and the grace of the female ankle. Horska, on the other hand, openly mocks the “appetizing” roundness, pokes fun at the overly lush beauty of both men and women, exaggerating volumes both vertically and horizontally. She creates not only a costume, but a vivid artistic image.
The idea of the paradoxical transformation of bodies was also used by Yevhen Lysyk in 1965. For some of the characters in Khachaturian’s ballet Spartacus, he chose paradoxical block-like statics in his sketches: not the white and pink marble of monuments and portraits, but granite blocks. There is no balletic mobility or dynamics — just chiseled profiles clutched in body draperies: the costumes of these Romans, patricians and legionnaires are made of the same material as the mausoleum on moscow’s red square. Lysyk chooses a red and black color scheme for the manifesto performance, with splashes of white, grey, green, and dark ochre, and adds bronze to the costumes. The fact that the sketches have an anti-soviet subtext (the ussr as the Fourth Rome) is evidenced by the use of two shades of red: instead of the toga purpurea, the royal and imperial purple toga, the artist dresses the hero in kumach (Turkish red). He wanted to associate the color of the USSR national flag with the color of the soviet union, not Jesus. A natural monumentalist, he also uses the structure of the embroidery as an element of the outfit, which has no analogues in the history of the Roman system, but is perceived metaphorically in the context of the “great chessboard” of war (ill. 4, 5).
Hanna Ipatieva, who directly observed Lysyk as a teacher, when her long-term partner Andriy Zlobin studied from him, postulates the need to turn to the history of Ukrainian stage avant-gardes (classical and from The Khrushchev Thaw) to rethink certain techniques perceived by her own tradition. In Hanna’s sketches for numerous productions, we notice not the influence of his monumental ideas, but rather a good knowledge of the plastic features of Ekster’s moving images, the technological nuances of attaching details in Khvostenko-Khvostov’s works, and the collage combinations of planes and decor by Petrytskyi. The artist’s work for Verdi’s opera Rigoletto, with its stitching and superimposition of geometric fragments, can be interpreted as a continuation of Meller’s traditions, although without expressive depiction of movement. Her long-term collaboration with the Kyiv Modern Ballet led the artist to create a large volume of sketches, where the bodily features of ballet dancers are rendered as something similar to insects and reptiles. Sometimes with infernal connotations of mechanistic horror with terrifying masks, which had never been seen before in Ukrainian scenography.
The experience of the Ukrainian stage avant-garde, which created a certain line of expression of the stage design that can be called national, is modified in the works of several contemporary stage designers through the use of certain techniques.
In some of her sketches for women’s costumes for S. Hulak-Artemovskyi’s Cossack Beyond the Danube, Liudmyla Nahorna fantasizes by combining details typical of different regions of our country. A synthetic image with a clear silhouette and unexpected use of vertical ribbons (reminiscent of some of Petrytskyi’s solutions for Turandot and Viy) tends to be fashionable. However, the modernization of the costume does not become a sketch for “neofolk” street fashion, partly because the color of the artist’s multi-layered designs tends to be earthy, natural tones without contrasting accents.
Constructive style features and graphic minimalism are combined in Natalia Rydvanetska’s three-dimensional collages for E. Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros. Choosing a black background and imitation of a pattern for the horizontal sketch, the artist complements the simplicity of the silhouettes with imitation of large stitching, expressive font signatures and details that can move in the third dimension. Each of the horizontal sketch strips turns into a kind of showcase, where there are not so many mannequins in clothes, but rather hangers with crucified shirts and exotic headdresses. The use of black paper for the background in the sketches is unprecedented, and analogues to the minimalist image include Maya (Mylytsia) Simashkevych’s 1924 sketches of the actors for E. Toller’s The Machine Men and Meller’s 1923 designs for Gas by H. Kaiser.
Inessa Kulchytska used the collage effect for her performance Sunset Tango, where the silhouettes of the fin de siècle era, recognizable from time-lapse photographs, are complemented by lace applications on conventional faces in black. The artist transforms the group sketch into a scene from urban life, as if the characters are moving along a boulevard, heading to/from the cemetery, which makes the sheet look almost like a book illustration.
Olena Polishchuk uses large plastic forms with large spots of contrasting color and tone in her costume sketches for the performance Playing Hide and Seek with Mr. Lyatoshynskyi. The triad of black, red and white (gouache one, which differs from the color of the paper) turns the character into a sign of convention, and the make-up of the face can freely flow onto the line, reminiscent of the techniques used in David Burliuk’s futuristic performances and Bronislava Nijinska’s constructivist productions.
In his sketch for the dance performance by choreographer S. Oleksiuk Bronislava Nijinska: Dance Reconstruction, Bohdan Polishchuk uses a clean outline filled with geometric contrasting spots. The heroines’ completely modern hairstyles are decorated with long ribbons that twist around the upper body: the modernization of the costumes resembles a play with forms and decor by Ekster, Meller and Petrytskyi, but without strong irony and eroticization, only with an emphasis on a certain frivolity of behavior. In the costumes for the play Oedipus by Sophocles, the artist creates mythological characters, inspired by the aesthetics of wooden idols: chest dresses decorated with relief images of symbols with elements of floral embroidery, ornaments from lizhnyks, fragments of Hutsul candlesticks. Instead of faces, these archaic creatures have geometric masks, and this anti-plasticity of the characters is rather a reflection of the ideas of Oskar Schlemmer in the Bauhaus in the mid-1920s.
The self-sufficiency of the stage sketch is also asserted in numerous works by students working in digital formats, but time will tell what discoveries and innovations will be made here.
Comments