Word: russianize
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...allied to the outgoing leader - a communist supporter and strict authoritarian - and those seeking change polarized an already embattled corps of dancers and musicians. Leadership changed hands four times between 1995 and 2004, including a stint by famed former principal dancer Vasiliev, who was unceremoniously dismissed in 2000 by Russian President Vladimir Putin himself. The short-lived replacements were all part of Russian ballet's insular old guard. "They were doing Sleeping Beauty the way it had always been done," says Andre Lewis, artistic director of Canada's Royal Winnipeg Ballet, North America's second oldest ballet company. "The Bolshoi...
...grittier, jazzier, more daring Western dance had become the new global standard. Now free to emigrate legally, Russian dancers followed famous cold war defectors, like the Kirov Ballet's Mikhail Baryshnikov, West by the dozens, looking for more complex choreography, brighter fame and bigger paychecks...
Before Ratmansky's arrival at Teatralnaya Square, the company's relationship with the Russian government had been on shaky ground. Toward the end of Grigorovich's tenure, as the company was consumed by internal squabbles and its touring productions were poorly received, government funding dried up. By 2000, President Putin, frustrated with ever-increasing delays in the Old Theater reconstruction project, ordered the Bolshoi to report directly to the Ministry of Culture, which would keep a tight rein on its finances. By the following year, the Bolshoi's estimated annual budget was substantially lower than other top ballet companies...
...Garafola, a dance historian and author of Legacies of Twentieth-Century Dance. Increasingly, it's choreographers like Ratmansky who are taking their place as ballet's headliners. In one of Ratmansky's most celebrated moves, for example, in 2003 he restaged Bright Stream, the full-length ballet by radical Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, which Stalin banned shortly after it premiered in Moscow in 1936. Ratmansky looks forward, too: his own creation, Go for Broke, features modern steps and bright yellow unitards, marking quite a departure from the traditional tutus and pink leotards of Cinderellas past. "You can't call...
Wall arrived at photography by way of conceptual art, and some of his work has the feel of small conceptual points inflated to large dimensions. But with the right pictures, the scale lends power and mystery. Dead Troops Talk is a fantasy of Russian soldiers massacred in Afghanistan in 1986 who have come back to life on the gray rocky roadway where they died. In an enormous tableau--the picture is 7 1/2 ft. tall and almost 14 ft. wide--they awaken to discover their own mangled flesh in shock, grief, sleepy-eyed indifference and also wild-eyed amusement...