On May 12, 1983, New York City Ballet became the first major ballet company to perform a work to minimalist music: Jerome Robbins's Glass Pieces, titled after its score by Philip Glass. The premiere came at a turning point for both minimalism and ballet. The dance world was reeling in the wake of the death of choreographer George Balanchine. Simultaneously, minimalist music was in the process of moving from countercultural avant-garde venues to wealthy, high-status institutions. Although previously minimalist music had helped postmodern choreographers create works that celebrated everyday movement and equality among dancers, for Robbins minimalist music conjured a sense of urban propulsion. In each of the ballet's first two sections, Robbins choreographed to Glass's music in two ways simultaneously: A group from the corps de ballet used the egalitarian techniques from postmodern dance to create a modern urban backdrop, while another group of soloists used virtuosic techniques from modernist ballet. This allowed audiences to shift their focus at any given moment between the anonymity of the corps and the heroic subjectivity of the soloists. In the third section of Glass Pieces, Robbins staged a virtuosic group dance for the corps de ballet, using Glass's exoticist music for Akhnaten to create an escape from the relentless modernity of the first two sections. Altogether, I argue that Glass Pieces is one of the earliest works of contemporary ballet and an important step in minimalist music's transition from its earlier heyday as a music representing countercultural egalitarianism to one representing the modern city.
Within a single decade, Bolshoi Theater in Moscow produced distinct versions of Aram Khachaturian’s ballet Spartacus by Igor Moiseyev (1958), Leonid Yakobson (1962), and Yuri Grigorovich (1968). A close examination of the three productions, analyzed along with evidence from the transcripts of the theater’s artistic committee meetings, newspaper criticism of the ballets, and audience surveys from the theater’s archive reveals how the productions participated in Thaw-era debates about the place of nationality in Soviet society. The original two choreographers, like Khachaturian, used the ballet as a place to stage the “Friendship of Peoples,” a metaphorical representation of Soviet society as a meeting place for diverse nationalities, conceived of as essentialized folk cultures. In 1968, when Grigorovich staged the ballet, he radically rearranged the score, replacing Khachaturian’s multi-ethnic display with an exhibition of ethnic homogenization. Grigorovich’s revisions reflected Khrushchev’s and Brezhnev’s campaigns to shape a single, unified Soviet national identity.
The Epilogue addresses how issues in Cold War cultural diplomacy have played out in the last few years, focusing on the figures of David Hallberg and Alexei Ratmansky, two artists who have worked in both the American and Russian ballet worlds. Through a brief examination of their careers, the Epilogue shows how deeply the rhetorical strategies worked out during the Cold War continue to dominate discussions of ballet in the United States and Russia, despite the many obvious overlaps of personnel and repertoire in today’s globalized ballet culture.
During the Cold War, the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union developed cultural exchange programs, in which they sent performing artists abroad in order to generate goodwill for their countries. Ballet companies were frequently called on to serve in these programs, particularly in the direct Soviet-American exchange. This book analyzes four of the early ballet exchange tours, demonstrating how this series of encounters changed both geopolitical relations and the history of dance. The ballet tours were enormously popular. Performances functioned as an important symbolic meeting point for Soviet and American officials, creating goodwill and normalizing relations between the two countries in an era when nuclear conflict was a real threat. At the same time, Soviet and American audiences did not understand ballet in the same way. As American companies toured in the Soviet Union and vice versa, audiences saw the performances through the lens of their own local aesthetics. Ballet in the Cold War introduces the concept of transliteration to understand this process, showing how much power viewers wielded in the exchange and explaining how the dynamics of the Cold War continue to shape ballet today.
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