135113 SE BA thesis: Avant-garde theater in German-speaking countries and Ukraine (2019W)

The aim of the course is to impart knowledge on the reform of the theater in German-speaking countries and Ukraine in the first decades of the 20th century. It will provide insights into the history of the emergence of the rejection of the naturalism on the stage; the history of the "anti-realistic" theater in Austria and Germany, as well as in the cultural area of the former Russian Empire and the early Soviet Union, which included Ukraine. The course will allow students to achieve competence in these areas. On the one hand, it is about the work of Max Reinhard and his role in creating the new theatrical aesthetics as well as such representatives of the German theater of Expressionism such as Oskar Kokoschka, Hugo Ball and the participants in "Sturm-Bühne", including the early work of Bertold Brecht. On the other hand, it is about the establishment of the new, anti-bourgeois theater in Russia and the activities of Vsevolod Meyerhold and Aleksandr Tairov. We will also cover the exploration of human movement by Rudolf von Laban and his "Theater of Movement", as well as about Bronislava Nižynska's "Studio of Movement" and their influence on theater innovation in both cultural areas.
We will examine in detail different historico-political contexts, radical changes in living conditions in Western and Eastern Europe as well as the role of crossing borders, which up to the end of the 1920s marked the circulation of culture between Vienna, Berlin, Munich, Paris, Moscow, Kyjiv and other cultural centers of modernity and the avant-garde. Also relevant is the representation of the artist milieu in them and its role for new stage experiments, such as the participation of expressionist painters such as Kandinsky, Klee, Marc and other in Munich; the avant-garde painters such as Malevyč, Exter, Meller, Petryc'kyj u.a. in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kyiv and Kharkiv. There will also be insights into the texts of plays, which were re-staged according to the avant-garde theater aesthetics, including the classical dramas of Sophocles and Shakespeare as well as texts by the authors of Expressionism such as Kaiser, Brecht and others.
At the center of the conversation during the course is the life and work of the director, cultural philosopher, theater theorist, organizer and teacher Les (Oleksandr) Kurbas (1887-1937), whose name is associated with the emergence of the avant-garde theater in Ukraine. His example is intended to show how artistic and philosophical ideas transferred from the West have gained new meaning as a result of the re-interpretation in the Ukrainian context of recording reform and the renewal of the theater. The mutual influences and differences between the Ukrainian, Russian and Western European avant-garde theaters are analyzed in comparison.
Relevant to the course are the following approaches: Michel Espagne's concept of cultural transfer and new interpretations of the category of translation as it developed in the course of the Translational Turn as "translation of and between cultures". We will also deal with cultural translation which understands translating as staging, as "mise en scène" and as the interweaving of self and others. We will also draw on Yuri Lotman's theory of boundary in examining the semiotic dynamics of culture. At the center of the course are comparative approaches: comparative cultural studies, theater and literature studies, history and philosophy.