Thora JordtUndergraduate Humanities Honors Fellow

Thora Jordt is a History and Art History major from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Her project examines the artist Alexandra Exter’s contributions as a costume and set designer for theatre and film between 1915 and 1925, with a focus on the 1924 film Aelita: Queen of Mars. The purpose of this examination is to understand how Exter’s relationship to artistic debates taking place in Paris, Rome, and Kiev during her early career as a painter informed her attitude towards the stage. Exter produced her first designs for the Kamerny Theatre in 1915, experimenting with glass, mirror, and tin in sets constructed of colorful bridges and stairs and sculptural, kinetic costumes that abstracted the movements of actors, transporting them in spirals and diagonals intended to communicate the speed and emotion of each scene without naturalizing the fiction and acted nature of the theatrical experience in the manner of Léon Bakst. Exter’s grasp of theatre as a way to hold “the mirror up to nature… and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure,” recalling Hamlet’s address to a troupe of players, was the driving principle behind her costume and set constructions, though it has been obscured through a reduction of Exter’s work to its literary worth - discussions of the specific plot of her films, or their commercial success. Hence, the title of the project is "Reconstructing Aelita" and will consist of an investigation not only into the life of the artist but her understanding of history and the role of art in a revolutionary situation.