About Theatre
The Les Kurbas Theatre of Lviv, Ukraine, was founded in 1988 by Volodymyr Kuchynsky and a group of young actors who, like the celebrated Ukrainian director Les Kurbas and his collegues in 1918, found themselves to be "newly trained…stuck amid old repertoires and longing for something more."
Since its inception, the Les Kurbas Theatre has grown into one of Ukraine's most critically acclaimed theatres-both in Ukraine and abroad. Its productions of Grace-given Erodiy, Games for Faust, Apocrypha, In Praise of Eros and Silenus Alcibiadis, Marko Prokliaty, or the Legend From the East, Narcissus, Waiting for Godot have been invited to (and invariably taken prizes at) numerous international theatre festivals, including Chekhov International Theatre Festival and Slavic Laurel Festival (Russia), Kontakt International Theatre Festival (Poland), Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre (Egypt), Stobi (Macedonia), Sibiu International Theatre Festival (Romania), Bosporos Agons and Golden Lion International Festival (Ukraine).
It also hosts its own festival"Theatre: Method and Practice" and has collaborated in joint projects and workshops at the Gardzience Centre of Theatre Studies (Poland), The Workcentre of Jerzy Grotowski (Italy), Anatoliy Vasiliev's The School of Dramatic Art (Russia), The Saratoga International Theatre Institute (New York). Additionally, the theatre also conducts its workshops throughout Europe and America.
Les ' Kurbas (1887-1937) was born in Western Ukraine in the family of famous actors. After having been dismissed from Lviv University where Kurbas studied philosophy, he went on to study theatre in Vienna, where he became deeply influenced by the theatre practices of and Edward Gordon Craig, Max Reinhardt and Adolphe Appia. In 1917 he founded the Kyiv Molody Theatre as a means for these practices to have an arena in Ukraine. By 1923 his Theatre had evolved into Berezil Artistic Association: a home to main stage and several developmental studio for acting, directing and designing. Playwrights and poets such as Kaiser, Sinclair, Moliere, Kulish, Oles', Shevchenko and Shakespeare graced Kurbas' stage as vehicles through which Ukrainian theatre had been elevated and transformed to a world-class status. At its height, The Berezil Theatre was recognized as one of the best European theatres of its time. The notoriety of this theatre and its director was cut short: under the auspices of Stalin's artistic purges, Kurbas was discharged from The Berezil Theatre, arrested as "an enemy of the soviet people", and executed on November 3, 1937.
