18 - The ballet avant-garde II: the ‘new’ Russian and Soviet dance in the twentieth century

Summary

In 1908, a collection of articles on contemporary Russian theatre appeared in St Petersburg. Modestly titled Theatre. A Book on the New Theatre, the volume featured contributions by the painter Alexandre Benois, theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold, future Commissar of Enlightenment Anatoly Lunacharsky, the symbolist poets Andrey Bely and Valery Bryusov, and novelist Fyodor Sologub. The diversity of this group suggests the significance of Russian theatre in St Petersburg at the turn of the century and the breadth of the quest for new forms in the arts in Russia in the early years of the twentieth century. The writers mostly advocated the latest movement in Russian theatre, shaped as it was by a fascination with emerging symbolist tendencies that sought to correct, or at least to dethrone, the naturalism of Konstantin Stanislavsky's Moscow Art Theatre, though Stanislavsky's innovations were still relatively new.

One year after the theatre volume appeared, Sergey Diaghilev presented Russian dancers in five ballets in his Saisons russes in Paris. The fame and notoriety of this “new” dance from Russia would soon eclipse the discussion of new theatre – and outlast that earlier phenomenon. Nonetheless, Russia's new ballet owed much to the experimentation of new theatre. The new ballet emerged alongside it, and, like the new theatre, new dance was simpler to define by what it was not. However variously writers conceived of the ‘new’ ballet, one thing was clear: Marius Petipa and the large repertory he created for the Russian Imperial Ballet represented the old.