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Text Box: Above: Poster by Waldemart Klyuzko. Below: Serhiy Zhadan & the Dogs perform “Know Your Rights.” Photos by Waldemart Klyuzko

Text Box: to successfully use film as part of the narrative. The second part of our exhibition focuses on the Berezil Theatre in Kharkiv (1926-1933). While preparing the exhibition, Ms. Tkacz found the orchestral score for Hello, This Is Radio 477! (1929), the first jazz revue in Ukraine. She shared this score, long assumed to be destroyed, with scholars and musicians. Dr. Mayhill Courtney Fowler, Stetson University, will explore the connections of Hello, This Is Radio 477! to such legendary Broadway revues as The Blackbirds of 1926. Anthony Coleman, New England Conservatory of Music and jazz pianist extraordinaire, will explore and demonstrate the American roots of Yuliy Meitus’s jazz score for Hello, This Is Radio 477!, while Fima Chupakhin will explore music from Kharkiv’s jazz age, unheard since 1930. These lecture-concerts performed in our reconstructed set for Hello, This Is Radio 477! should be the blockbuster of the exhibition. The special events Les Kurbas and the New World – America: October 26-29 Concert/lecture by Anthony Coleman on the American jazz roots of Yuliy Meitus’s score Hello This Is Radio 477! Media lecture by Dr. Mayhill Courtney Fowler on the connections of Hello This Is Radio 477! to legendary Broadway revues. Concert/lecture by Fima Chupakhin on popular American dance tunes

in Hello, This Is Radio 477!

November 8-12 Media lectures by Lynn Garafola, Columbia University, on Bronislava Nijinska, and Virlana Tkacz, on Kurbas’s transformation of an American novel into a Ukrainian experimental theatre piece with film. There will also be performances by Yara’s Kyiv actors.

These events are made possibly by the US Embassy in Kyiv.

Text Box: Les Kurbas and the New World – America is a series of events focusing on the American connections to the work of Les Kurbas, presented as part of the mega exposition Kurbas: New Worlds at the Art Arsenal in Kyiv. The first section of our exhibition focuses on Kurbas productions at the Berezil Artistic Association in Kyiv (1922-1926). Kurbas’s use of movement to create an explosion at a gas factory in his production of Gas was ground-breaking for its time. A group of actors entered as workers, turned into the machines they operated, then were transformed by the gas and finally in one breath exploded all over the stage. Yara found a series of photographs at the Kyiv Museum of Theatre, Music & Cinema that clearly documented these moments and created an installation with them that is part of the Kurbas exhibit. Yara turned to Columbia professor Lynn Garafola, the acknowledged world-expert on Nijinska, to deepen our understanding of the choreography by Nadia Shuvarska, who headed Bronislava Nijinska’s School in Kyiv. She will present a media lecture on Nijinska’s work in Kyiv 1915-1920. Kurbas’s use of film to show what a character was thinking in his production of Jimmie Higgins, was a subject familiar to curator Virlana Tkacz, a theatre director who often uses projections in her own productions. For the exhibition she created a series of video installations which explore this topic. She will present a media lecture on how an American novel by Upton Sinclair became the most popular Ukrainian experimental production of the 1920s, and one of the first shows in the world

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Kurbas was fascinated with American film, literature and music. In turn, his theatre’s productions fascinated Americans and were featured at the most important modernist theatrical event in New York in 1926: the International Theatre Exhibit organized by Jane Heap, the editor of Little Review who first published James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway. A copy of the Little Review with photographs from Berezil productions will be featured in Kurbas: New World on loan from the US Embassy in Kyiv, which bought this special document.

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