The room spins, the Earth moves, shapes float or soar, colours are a shifting rainbow prism, towns blend into rivers into countryside. Buildings abstracted into airy, blue-grey shards jolt against tilting roofs, and a lamppost just holds its ground above the rushing Seine in Alexandra Exter’s “Bridge. Sevres”. A thrusting blue train slices through rhythmic arcs of emerald fields in Oleksandr Bohomazov’s “Landscape, Locomotive”.
A magical section, drawing on fragile pieces from Kyiv’s Museum of Theatre, Music and Cinema showcases Meller’s lyrical Cubist designs for Bronislava Nijinska’s ballet studio in Kyiv in 1919, and Anatol Petrytskyi’s exuberant Constructivist costumes, bodies divided into cylinders, semi-circles, rhomboids darting simultaneously in different directions, for Moscow Chamber Ballet’s Eccentric Dances .