Like a Bomb Going Off: Leonid Yakobson and Ballet as Resistance in Soviet Russia PDF
Preview Like a Bomb Going Off: Leonid Yakobson and Ballet as Resistance in Soviet Russia
Like a Bomb Going Off (cid:2) L i k e a B o m b G o i n g O f f Leonid Yakobson and Ballet as Re sis tance in Soviet Rus sia Janice Ross Foreword by Lynn Garafola New Haven & London Copyright © 2015 by Janice Ross. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail sales.press@ yale.edu (U.S. offi ce) or [email protected] (U.K. offi ce). Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ross, Janice. Like a bomb going off : Leonid Yakobson and ballet as resistance in Soviet Russia / Janice Ross ; foreword by Lynn Garafola. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-300-20763-7 (hardback) 1. IAkobson, Leonid. 2. Choreographers—Soviet Union—Biography. 3. Dancers— Soviet Union—Biography. 4. Ballet—Soviet Union—History. 5. Dance—Political aspects—Soviet Union. I. Title. GV1785.I17R67 2015 792.8'0947—dc23 2014022306 A cata logue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48– 1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Frontispiece: Yakobson in rehearsal for Troika with dancers of his company, Choreographic Miniatures, Leningrad, 1973. Photo: Anatoly Pronin. Dedicated with love to the memories of Joshua Bartel and Keith Bartel This page intentionally left blank (cid:2) Contents Foreword, by Lynn Garafola ix Note on Transliteration xiv Introduction 1 one Ballet and Power: Leonid Yakobson in Soviet Rus sia 9 two Beginnings: Learning to Be an Outsider 60 Contents three What Is to Be Done with Ballet? 83 four Chilling and Thawing: Cold War Ballet and the Anti- Jewish Campaign 164 five Spartacus 241 six Dismantling the Hero 301 seven A Company of His Own: Privatizing Soviet Ballet 333 eight Totalitarianism, Uncertainty, and Ballet 372 Epilogue 419 Appendix: Works by Leonid Yakobson 435 Notes 455 Ack now ledgm ents 501 Index 505 viii (cid:2) Foreword Lynn Garafola soviet dance history is full of muted voices, artists who spent de cades in creative silence while keeping inner faith with the modernist ideals of the 1920s. Among this courageous group was Leonid Yakobson. A chore- ographer as crotchety as he was resolute, Yakobson was an artist of con- tradictions, a modernist who shed his early proletarian skin but continued to make war on ballet and use unconventional movement, even as he worked with Rus sia’s greatest ballet dancers. He made dances for the lead- ing Soviet companies, but struggled for years to establish his own troupe, which became the fi rst of its kind in the postwar Soviet Union. He was a Jew who created his fi rst Jewish- themed dances in the late 1940s as Jews were being arrested as “rootless cosmopolitans” and “bourgeois national- ists,” yet he refused to emigrate even when it became possible to do so. He was a man with a profound sense of irony who seemed unfazed when a ix
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