2007 » Belarus » Student section

The Land Under White Wings

The exhibition features artwork by students of The Belarusian State Academy of Arts (stage design, scale – 1:25, setting and costumes) made for Yanka Kupala’s national classic The Destroyed Nest, Vladimir Karatkevich’s The Wild Hunt of King Stakh, Russian classics – Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, Bulgakov’s Don Quixote, Gorin’s That Very Munchausen, and de Coster’s version of the European masterpiece Til Eulenspiegel. In 2006 the Belarusian School of Scene Design celebrated its 50th anniversary. During this time it has gained a lot of experience and developed its own traditions. The artworks by young Belarusian artists are marked by typical peculiarities – acute feeling for the source material, negativism toward naturalism, minute details of rural life, usage of symbolism. The young artists managed to find their own singular treatment of each work, with an original understanding of each piece’s theme. The scene characters contain the essence of the designed performance. Each character creates the performance; each manifests the movement of the play. It is extremely important that in their work the artists show the understanding of the principles of active stage design. It’s these principles that dominate Belarusian scene design in the past few decades. Many undergraduate art students do not pursue historical accuracy, but give the characters metaphorical expressiveness.