The Art of Building and Breaking Connections. Episode One: “Museum Story” by Petro Rulin

Against the backdrop of the increasingly widespread borrowing of approaches from other humanitarian disciplines by theater studies (which issometimes perceived as higher mathematics and the last gasp of theater studies), the basic principles of theater history research, like errors in simple arithmetic operations, constantly remind of themselves. In Ukraine, among those who sought to translate both the theater itself and theater studies onto scientific rails and laid the foundations of theater arithmetic, perhaps the greatest role was played by Les Kurbas and Petro Rulin, who, without looking back at their own and other people’s authorities, sought to create not only new institutions, but also new types of institutions. It would seem that there is not much in common between the interests of a theater historian, a theater scholar, on the one hand, and theater practitioner, on the other. In fact, their interests coincided: they jointly took care of the theater museum, the creation of a dictionary of theater terms and a model of the director’s plan for the performance, and most importantly, they ensured that, in contrast to empirical knowledge and “empirical theater” (Les Kurbas), theater science was formed, which they outlined in various terms: science of art, science of theater, theater science, historical and theater science, director’s science, directing science, scientific history of theater, scientific theater studies, stage studies, etc. The principles of evidentiary theater studies were presented by Petro Rulin in his concept of a theater museum, one of the episodes of which is considered in the proposed investigation.