The Woman’s Space in the Ukrainian Avant-garde Theatre

Abstract

The new relationship between an artist and a model in the avant-garde art has found its apt expression in the gender aspect. Along with traditional perceptions of a woman’s beauty and her sexual appeal, worshipping a female model as a sexual model has remained firmly in the past. At the same time, in the context of theatrical avant-garde research gender issues have never been the focus of local researchers. And despite the fact that women were active participants in the avant-garde movement and served those artists who created the new art and models that inspired artists to create their work, their role in the artistic avant-garde have practically failed to be explored by Ukrainian scholars. Only in some separate cases achievements of individual masters have been studied, such as of Alexandra Exter and Maria Sinyakova, while overall the impact of women on the theatrical avant-garde has been left out of sight.Taking this into account, the gender balance in the Ukrainian avant-garde theatre is a key aspect of the given study. At the initial stage of its development the theatrical avant-garde demonstrated a unification of male and female beginnings as equal parts whereas peculiarities of female forms were either hidden completely or served as reinforcing factors for the recreation of the new epoch’s industrial spirit. Later on, directors would perceive the woman as a carrier of the archaic ritual tradition that was being broken by avant-garde. In the mid-1920s, the avant-garde culture saw a rise in its interest towards the bourgeois woman or the petty bourgeoisie type, whereas attention to the woman in the leather jacket remained in the past.The social and political context in which the Ukrainian art was functioning in the early 1930s, as well as pressures of the Soviet ideology, had forced avant-garde directors to focus on confronting the worker-type woman to that of a half-responsible philistine or a fully irresponsible bourgeoisie. This approach to gender issues essentially transferred the discourse to the realm of a class struggle whereupon the creative potential of the Ukrainian avant-garde theatre was used primarily for political purposes.