The interaction of the arts of theater, cinema and music in the postmodernist interpretations of the coryphaeus’ works directed by O. Kovshun
Authors: Kalenichenko Olha 
Published: September 2023

Statement of the problem. In recent decades, Ukrainian directors have turned to the dramaturgical heritage of coryphaeus – to the works of I. Karpenko-Kary, M. Starytsky, M. Kropyvnytsky. On the stages of theaters represents a very wide palette of interpretations of their works: from realistic and psychological performances with authentic Ukrainian clothes and elements of everyday life to experiments with acting plasticity and searching for new scenography opportunities, but Oleksandr Kovshun demonstrated a fundamentally new approach to the classical texts in his spectacles “Burlaka” (2010), based on the play of the same name by I. Karpenko-Kary, and “Love” (2018), based on the play by M. Kropyvnytsky “Where is grain, there is chaff”, in the Kharkiv State Academic Ukrainian Drama Theater named after T. H. Shevchenko. At the same time, there are still no scientific works by art critics, in which these performances were analyzed and the creative assets of the director were understood. Objectives and novelty of the research. The purpose of the study is to prove that O. Kovshun’s productions “Burlaka”(“Rover”) and “Love”, which based on interaction of such art types as theater, cinema and music presenting non-standard directorial decisions, correspond to the principles of postmodern theater. For the first time, Kovshun’s performances “Burlaka” and “Love” are considered from the point of view of postmodernism aesthetics, which makes it possible to estimate the director’s work from a new angle. Results of the research. In the performance “Burlaka”, Kovshun transposes the plot of KarpenkoKary’s play to the 2000s and, thanks to the postmodern literary game with the pre-text, turns it into a modern plot talking about both, the local elections and the current problems of the country. The same technique of transposition is used by the director in the play “Love”, where the audience is immersed in the 1970s and 80s, and only the plot of Zinka’s love for Roman remains in the play. Kovshun’s active use of images-symbols in his performances allows to interest the intellectual viewer, to force him to start thinking about what he saw and heard. At the same time, images-symbols help to better understand the director’s ideological and artistic concept of performances. Conclusion. The study showed that O. Kovshun creates the postmodern performances, and it can be revealed on the levels of poetics, the director’s experiments with new symbiotic genre forms (the director’s definitions “horror comedy”, “mystical drama”), the synthesis of the theater of “experience” and the “physical” theater, and the stylistics demonstrating eclecticism, which in “Burlaka” is observed in scenography and musical accompaniment, as well as on the dramaturgy level that be influenced by cinematographic technique on the construction of the scenes. In “Love”, a certain selection of domestic and Western European songs carrying self-own contexts allows to more accurately reveal the experiences of the heroine. The solo, couple and group dances and pop numbers play an important role in the performances. All this allows us to speak, in our opinion, about the crystallization of the artist’s postmodern creative method.