Ballet and the Soviet Body:
ln early Soviet times, confusion reigned over the role ballet should play in the new society. Identified with the Imperial authorities, ballet companies had to reinvent themselves as contributors to the new polity, and the engineers of human souls that Stalin would eventually decree was the proper role of artists in Soviet society. This paper will discuss the way in which the focus of ballet productions moved to give physical form to revolutionary ideas, its few successes and more usually its artistic failures. Eventual compromise with Socialist Realism would move the focus of ballet from story to movement and, in conjunction with massive investment in training and talent identification, would give rise to the world's best ballet companies. This focus on the body as a means of expression was hardly accidental: the spectacle of ballet was less likely to offend or transgress government policy than text-based art forms. This paper will discuss how ballet emerged as a solution to criticisms of freedom of cultural expression and a powerful and popular tool for domestic and international audiences.
To be given at the Body in Eastern European and Russian Cinema Conference, University of Greenwich, June 2013.
ln early Soviet times, confusion reigned over the role ballet should play in the new society. Identified with the Imperial authorities, ballet companies had to reinvent themselves as contributors to the new polity, and the engineers of human souls that Stalin would eventually decree was the proper role of artists in Soviet society. This paper will discuss the way in which the focus of ballet productions moved to give physical form to revolutionary ideas, its few successes and more usually its artistic failures. Eventual compromise with Socialist Realism would move the focus of ballet from story to movement and, in conjunction with massive investment in training and talent identification, would give rise to the world's best ballet companies. This focus on the body as a means of expression was hardly accidental: the spectacle of ballet was less likely to offend or transgress government policy than text-based art forms. This paper will discuss how ballet emerged as a solution to criticisms of freedom of cultural expression and a powerful and popular tool for domestic and international audiences.
To be given at the Body in Eastern European and Russian Cinema Conference, University of Greenwich, June 2013.
