Kinetographies of a heretical ballet

Theatre revolutions in Soviet Russia

Abstract

The first two decades of the 20th century represented for Russia a period of extraordinary artistic and cultural ferment initiated in Moscow within the Russian Academy of Artistic Sciences (RAChN) by the Chronological Workshop active between 1923 and 1929. Theatrical innovations were experimented with by the New Dance, the RAChN and the choreographic language of artists such as K. Golejzovsky and G. Balanchine, who fled to the West from Soviet censorship to elaborate their visions on mass choreography, arriving at community utopias, biomechanics and dance notation. Graphic shorthand and recordings of movements participate in the break with the traditional canons of ballet, bringing the nude onto the stage with O. Desmond, the devices of N. Meyerhold and S. Eisenstein and the Soviet cybernetics of N. Bernštejn: stereoscopic diagrams of simple trajectories designed for the construction of the human machine during working hours. The new scene represents a field of investigation that shows the misalignment of Russian art circles, on the one hand, concerning the former autocratic imperial regimes and, on the other hand, concerning the emerging Bolshevism. In this sense, the graphics of ballet, stage production, stage costume and the body manifest a form of divergence, of heresy, understood as a free expression of the art of movement. Starting with the graphic (notational, costume, scenographic) corpus of works such as Casse-Noisette (1919) by A. Gorsky, Le Tourbillon rouge (1924) by K. Goleizovsky, Aelita (1924) by J. Protazanov, Le Beau Joseph (1925) by K. Goleizovsky, to name but a few, the article aims to develop an examination of the graphic transcription of some of the ballet performances that became vehicles of culture at the dawn of the 20th century, often placing themselves in open opposition to the regime's propaganda.