The Igor Moiseyev Dance Company

Anthony Shay

Description

In this book Anthony Shay examines the life and works of renowned choreographer Igor Moiseyev and his dance company. Formed in 1937, The Igor Moiseyev Dance Company have performed across the globe and are the first major Soviet dance group to perform in the United States. Through The Igor Moiseyev Dance Company, dance became a vital diplomatic tool, ballerinas replaced atom bombs and helped usher in a new era of cultural exchange, formalized by an agreement signed by the United States and the Soviet Union. Through this book Shay explores the multiple lenses of spectacle, Russian nationalism and the Cultural Cold War, to describe and analyse the history of Moiseyev’s company, and the shock that ‘innocent’ folk dance gave the American government. Blending academic study and personal anecdote, Shay provides a nuanced analysis of Moiseyev’s importance and his place in the world of dance. This is the first English language study of Igor Moiseyev and his dance company.

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1: Spectacle

Chapter 2: Russian Nationalism: The Nation Dance - Russian Identity and The Igor Moiseyev Dance Company

Chapter 3: The Cultural Cold War: Dance and The Igor Moiseyev Dance Company

Chapter 4: Igor Aleksandrovich Moiseyev and His Dance Company: A Life in Dance

Chapter 5: The Igor Moiseyev Dance Company, The Igor Moiseyev Ballet, The State Academic Ensemble of Folk Dances of the Peoples of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics: Three Titles, One Company

Chapter 6: Moiseyev's Movement Vocabulary and Choreographic Strategies 

Notes 

References 

Index

 

Sujets

• Arts visuels
• Arts visuels
• Academic
• Performing Arts
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Russian nationalism
• Academia
• Federal government of the United States
• General officer
• Cultural studies
• History of Europe
• Dance
• General
• Ballet
• ART
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 15 mai 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781789380118
• Langue: English

Extrait

This book is for my dear friend Philip C. Nix
First published in the UK in 2019 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2019 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2019 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas
Cover image: Painted by Khosrow Jamali
Production manager: Jessica Lovett
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-999-6
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78938-012-5
ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78938-011-8
Printed and bound by Short Run Press Limited, UK.
This is a peer-reviewed publication.
Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: Spectacle
Chapter 2: Russian Nationalism: The Nation Dances – Russian Identity and The Igor Moiseyev Dance Company
Chapter 3: The Cultural Cold War: Dance and The Igor Moiseyev Dance Company
Chapter 4: Igor Aleksandrovich Moiseyev and His Dance Company: A Life in Dance
Chapter 5: The Igor Moiseyev Dance Company, The Igor Moiseyev Ballet, The State Academic Ensemble of Folk Dances of the Peoples of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics: Three Titles, One Company
Chapter 6: Moiseyev’s Movement Vocabulary and Choreographic Strategies
Notes
References
Index
Acknowledgements

One of the most joyous tasks that an author can exercise is thanking the many individuals and organizations that provide help and support along the journey of creating a study. First, I want to thank my colleagues and the administration of Pomona College for the generous support for travel they provided for me as I conducted research and wrote this book. Two Pomona College research grants enabled me to travel to New York, Cres, Croatia, and Moscow. Thank you also to Pomona College for the generous subvention to support the publication of this book.
I also thank the unsung heroes of the library staff, especially Holly Gardinier, at the Honnold Mudd Library of the Claremont Colleges and the New York Public Library Jerome Robbins Dance Collection.
I thank Gediminas Karoblis and Egil Bakka of the University of Norway, Trondheim, who run the European Union’s Choreomundus Project, and all of the students who took part in the program, for generously inviting me, as a pioneer researcher, to both join in the teaching project and for inviting me to give a lecture on Igor Moiseyev and The Igor Moiseyev Dance Company in May of 2015. I had a fascinating time bouncing ideas off the students and I most enjoyed the discussions I had with Gediminas on modernism and the Ballets Russes, for which we both have a fascination.
I want to thank Elena Shcherbakova, the successor to Igor Moiseyev’s artistic mantle, which he personally passed on to her, and her staff and the performers who hosted me in Moscow in May and June 2016, during their busy rehearsals and concert preparations. It gave me the opportunity to see the company up close and realize that they still have the magic that Igor Moiseyev instilled in them and which they carry out with reverence to his memory. All images throughout this book are sourced and used with permission from the The Igor Moiseyev Ballet.
I wish also to express my gratitude to Mieczslaw Buduszynski, my colleague in the Politics Department at Pomona College, who generously offered me the opportunity to present a lecture at the Politics Seminar that he directs annually on the Island of Cres, Croatia in July 2017, in which I lectured on the influence of Igor Moiseyev, not only in dance, but in the politics of the Cold War and the establishment of state-supported dance companies throughout the Communist World and beyond to give meaning to the term “choreographic politics.”
I thank Philip C. Nix, a good and patient friend, who read every page of the many drafts I produced and gave me much needed feedback from the viewpoint of an intellectual and interested reader. The recent passing of my dear friend and companion Mario Casillas saddens me because he was always so proud of my writing and wanted to read the book. I have been blessed for the many years we shared together.
I also thank the two unnamed readers of the manuscript who made important suggestions to make the study more effective and save me from errors. Any errors of fact remain mine.
Always, I save for last the heartfelt thanks to my life’s helpmate Khosrow Jamali, who always listens to my ideas, offers interesting solutions, and helps to fortify the writing process with delicious meals, love, and support. Without him, life would not be the joyous process it has become.
Introduction
I first met Igor Aleksandrovich Moiseyev when I was 22 years old, just as I was beginning my career in the world of dance. Fortunate circumstances have provided me with the wonderful experiences of being a dancer, choreographer, artistic director, and finally, a dance scholar and historian. My embodied experiences in dance have allowed me to articulate the themes about which I write today, including dancing several Moiseyev works like the Old City Quadrilles . In this study I write about the life and career of Igor Moiseyev, dancer, choreographer and artistic director, and his company, which throughout its amazing history awed the world. I want to explore the choreographies he created, his company’s impact on world affairs, and how his legacy echoes today.
In its long existence The Igor Moiseyev Dance Company visited over one hundred countries, representing first the Soviet Union, and subsequently its successor state, the Russian Federation, which it still represents more than eighty years after its founding. I am honoring a debt that I strongly feel that I owe Maestro Moiseyev (1906–2007) for my own career. His example of magical choreographies and the powerful performances of his ensemble of virtuosic dancers and musicians empowered me as a young man in my early twenties to attempt to create my own dance company and my own choreographies, which could hold the stage for full evening performances of folk and traditional dance. In the realm of folk dance, this had not been attempted in the United States. I lovingly created many dances for a span of fifty years. I succeeded beyond my wildest dreams, and thus, I owe Mr. Moiseyev a debt to introduce him, or in many cases reintroduce him, to dance students and scholars. In the English-speaking world, Igor Moiseyev is largely forgotten, and little information about him exists. Even many dance historians do not remember him and his long, distinguished, and rich professional career.
This neglect came, in part I believe, because in the 1950s, when The Igor Moiseyev Dance Company first appeared in the United States, dance scholarship had barely begun, and the scholarship that existed at that time was devoted almost exclusively to concert dance, which means ballet, modern dance, and its practitioners. Igor Moiseyev’s work constituted a kind of hybrid genre that scholars, and even dance critics of the time were unable to successfully characterize. Some trained observers at that time understood that they were not viewing “authentic” folk dance, and that the Moiseyev dancers clearly had ballet training. Typical of the writing of the time, The New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff stated: “The Igor Moiseyev Dance Company is, of course, a ballet company in disguise, it is a troupe of professional, ballet-trained dancers” (“Moiseyev Company Visits with its Legendary Bravura” Moiseyev Publicity Packet, n.pag.). While partially true, this claim is simplistic and misses several important points. In this study, I am making another, more nuanced argument: Igor Moiseyev actually created a new genre of dance, in which ballet constitutes only one of the elements from which he constructed it. Most of all, he used his new genre to create a new type of spectacle: staged folk dance, what I call ethno-identity dance because it is a genre of dance that is prepared for performances before audiences for purposes of representation, and has specific ethnic references. It is not folk dance by which I mean dances that mostly rural and tribal populations dance as an organic part of their lives (Shay, Ethno-Identity Dance for Sex, Fun, and Profit ). Quite simply, neither Igor Moiseyev nor the Soviet Government was interested in authentic folk dances, but rather something that they could call folk dance. They wanted and needed spectacle and monumentality, which I can call the celebration of the big that characterized Soviet art and architecture throughout the Soviet era (Bown, Art Under Stalin ). Igor Moiseyev had the genius to understand that need, to brilliantly fulfill it, and in doing so with such immense international success that other governments and practitioners understood the political and aesthetic power of Moiseyev’s choreographies and performances and either imitated, emulated, or were inspired by his model to create dance companies in the Moiseyev image. In this introduction I will highlight some of the themes that I will discuss in the following chapters.
Why Dance? What Kind of Dance?
During the formation of the Soviet Socialist state dance played a crucial role. As dance historian Elizabeth Souritz observes “The 1920s and 1930s, saw a dance boom in Soviet Russia” (21). However, it was only in the beginning of this period, the only time freedom in artistic expression occurred in the history of the Soviet Union, there was a great deal of experimentation in the wake of performances and teaching by Isadora Duncan, under the influence of German Ausdruckstanz , and theatrical experimentation that was rampant in Russia at that t