1924

Stage Design for "Turandot" by Carlo Gozzi

Russian (born Ukraine), 1882 - 1949

Exter’s work suggests a link between the pre–World War I Ballets Russes and the post–Russian Revolution experiments of avant-garde theater of the 1920s. Having spent six years in Paris before the outbreak of the war, Exter returned to Russia in 1914 to join Moscow’s Kamerny Theater, where she was a pioneer of constructivist theater design, reimagining the stage as a dynamic unit, organically joining performer and setting. As this décor demonstrates, Exter adapted the striking colors of a Sergei Diaghilev production and rethought its lavish immersive environment as an abstracted architectonic volume, with the actor’s body a mobile element of the whole.