An avant-garde artist on whose shoulders contemporary creators stand, Les Kurbas’ productions introduced the effect of film editing in theatrical action, constructivist sets, light play, modern choreography, film projections, original musical scores — completely new solutions for the stage. Kurbas realized countless ideas in his productions. Here are just 3 of them.
In 1924, Kurbas put on Jimmy Higgins and did the unprecedented — he used 20 film clips as one of the main elements of the narrative. The videos explained the hero’s actions and revealed his inner world. Kurbas himself filmed the clips with the actors involved in the production. The combination of cinema and stage action in this way was more than innovative. Les Kurbas undoubtedly stood at the origins of multimedia in theater.
For his productions, Kurbas created special orchestral music. For example, in the futuristic production Gas (composer Anatolii Butskyi), 48 musicians performed industrial music that resembled the clatter of hundreds of typewriters, the work of presses and factories.
Abstraction from the body was one of Kurbas’s innovations. Imagine: in Gas, actors walk onto the stage and begin to move, and the audience realizes they are looking at… a factory conveyor belt. Accompanied by music, the actors transform into machines — tools of labor, then — through hissing — into gas, and finally into an explosion.
