Word: ballets
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Physical training!" snorted one elderly Russian balletomane, stomping out of Moscow's cavernous Bolshoi Theater. "Pantomime!" jeered another. Inside, the spectators traded insults for a full 15 minutes after the final curtain. Source of their excitement: a new ballet entitled Spartacus, marking the first major departure from the classic choreographic style in which Russian ballet has been frozen on pointe for 30 years...
After famed reforming Choreographer Michel Fokine finally left Russia in 1918, the country's ballet degenerated for a time into choreographed political posters, continued to develop impressive technical skill. But it lived in a world apart from the fresh dance ideas that swept through Europe and the U.S. Later, the major companies commissioned works by modern composers, including Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Khachaturian, but all three tailored their music to the classic choreographic idiom. The Russians' failure in modern productions became most evident during the Bolshoi Ballet's otherwise hugely successful 1956 season at London's Covent Garden...
...onstage musicians and dancers, tells the story of Rome's slave uprising as outlined by Sallust and Plutarch, ending in the betrayal and death of the slaves' leader, the gladiator Spartacus (a favorite historical character of Karl Marx). Composer Khachaturian, a Stalin Prizewinner, diplomatically finds the ballet apt "at a time when many peoples are fighting for liberation and colonial rule is crumbling...
...opening-night audience stared pop-eyed at some choice Saturnalia and orgies, at an Egyptian belly dance and a Greek striptease, at gladiatorial combat in the arena. In his experimental dance technology, Moiseyev brilliantly scrapped most of the cliché-laden movements and figures of Russian classical ballet, while retaining classical techniques of body control. Moreover, Moiseyev did away with the traditional counterpoint between soloist and corps de ballet, made mass dancing the ballet's main feature ("My hero," says Moiseyev, "is the masses...
Troubling the Audience. If Spartacus should prove the beginning of a revolution in Russian ballet, the Bolshoi Company clearly has the talent and technique to extend it. Most of the first-rate young dancers in last week's production (including Julia May Scott, daughter of an American Negro and a Russian mother) were unknown to the West. They were drawn from the corps de ballet on the theory that they would be less hidebound by classical technique than the older dancers (an exception: famed Soloist Maya Plisetskaya, dancing the courtesan Aegina). Lavishly supported by the government, the Bolshoi currently...