CREATING A VIRTUAL STUDY ABROAD EXPERIENCE TO RUSSIA

COVID-19 has drastically altered our world. Though travel is halted, global education does not have to stop. We used this time to reconceive the notion of study abroad and designed a study abroad program that could be facilitated virtually and enhanced with face-to-face classroom interaction. We were inspired to embark on this journey for several reasons. First, the realities of the pandemic create risks associated with international travel. Second, international experiences need to be more accessible–more students should be able to participate in global education, even if they do not have the means or ability to do so. We present our design considerations in building and implementing this virtual study abroad program. As part of the design, we partnered with VEXA (Virtual Experiences Abroad), a Moscow-based company that built the online interface and facilitated the interactions between our students and Russian citizens, including visits to a Russian Orthodox Church, the Bolshoi Ballet theater, and elementary and middle schools. We also brought elements of Russian culture to life through face-to-face experiences including a live cooking session with a Russian chef, discussions with a Russian Orthodox priest, and a ballet lesson with a company member of the Bolshoi theatre. These types of experiences facilitated group discussions and social interaction opportunities, crucial for establishing relationships. Overall, our main goal was to reconceive the traditional notion of study abroad while garnering results that would match the transformational gains that global education provides.

Jean-Christophe Maillot

Jean-Christophe Maillot is one of the few French choreographers to have achieved international recognition in the field of contemporary ballet in recent years. This chapter explores his fraught early development as a classically trained artist in the midst of a contemporary dance boom in France and his subsequent career at the helm of Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo. There, he found the practical support and creative freedom to build a large repertoire, both narrative and abstract, from 1993 onward. Finally, Maillot’s process and style are explored through a case study: The Taming of the Shrew, a ballet he created for Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet in 2014. On the basis of studio-based sociological observations and interviews conducted during the rehearsals, this creation is envisioned as an example of the hybrid nature of new works in ballet today and the influence of the environment in which they are made.

Three Hamlet ballets from World War II to the Ukrainian crisis

Breaking with a tradition of action-filled ballets with a heroic protagonist, a number of 20th- and 21st-century choreographies of Hamlet have probed the psychological and political themes of William Shakespeare’s tragedy. Inspired by theatre and film productions, choreographers have also used the medium’s visual language to comment on Shakespeare’s text and open up its interpretive potentialities. This article analyses three adaptations: Robert Helpmann’s 1942 version for the Sadler’s Wells Ballet, Kenneth MacMillan’s 1988 Sea of Troubles for six former Royal Ballet dancers, and Radu Poklitaru and Declan Donnellan’s iconoclastic 2015 Hamlet for Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet.

Valorizing Uncertainty

Chance. Improvisation. Uncertainty. During the Cold War, these words came to be freighted with a complex set of aesthetic meanings in the Soviet Union and the United States. These nuances in the usage of these terms, the kind of arts practice they made possible, and the ways they were linked to each nation’s political frames hold important insights into the politicizing of aesthetic practices and the aestheticizing of social revolutions. This essay considers the affordances of constraints when paired with the selective use of improvisation in the work of Russian choreographer Leonid Yakobson. A close reading of the work of Yakobson, the leading modernist at the Kirov Ballet and the Bolshoi Ballet throughout the years of Stalin’s rule and into the first decades of the Cold War, is a relevant case study. It reveals how, clandestinely in his rehearsal rooms, a degree of improvisation and chance carried unique aesthetic force and political risk.

Goleizovsky (Goleizovskii), Kas’ian Yaroslavich (1892–1970)

A Russo-Soviet choreographer, dancer, and artist, Kas’ian Goleizovsky was exposed to various art forms from early childhood: dance at the Bolshoi ballet school; fine and applied arts at Moscow’s Stroganov Institute; and music lessons with the celebrated violinist David Krein. This broad education enabled him to perceive dance in terms of line and color, to integrate costume and choreography, and to infuse visual rhythm, emotional expression, bodily movement, and musicality into his artistic explorations. His collaborations with avant-garde visual artists such as Petr Galadzhev, Anatolii Petritsky, and Boris Erdman, and with composers such as Boris Ber, Matvei Blanter, and Sergei Prokofiev were always distinguished by strong mutual understanding. A pre-postmodern choreographer, Goleizovsky moved among very different systems and types of dances, including classic, eccentric, variety, ballroom, and music hall.

Theodore Kosloff & Cecil B. DeMille

The essay explores a rare and unknown 40-year professional and personal relationship between Russian ballet dancer Theodore Kosloff (1882-1956) and Hollywood director Cecil B. DeMille (1881-1959) told through the prism of the making of DeMille’s Madam Satan (mgm 1930). It tracks Kosloff’s colorful career as a dance entrepreneur, from his Bolshoi Ballet beginnings, to his appearance in the premiere Paris season of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, to his eventual relocation to Los Angeles where, starting in 1916, he was an acclaimed character actor in nearly 30 silent movies, primarily directed by DeMille. At the outset of the Depression, with the advent of sound in cinema, DeMille relied upon Kosloff as an artistic advisor to bring to fruition Madam Satan his first and only movie musical. The essay analyzes the high-art roots of Kosloff’s bizarre and exceptional ballet mécanique, Madam Satan’s central dance number staged in a moored zeppelin.

The Caucasian Connection: National Identity in the Ballets of Aram Khachaturian

The ballets of Aram Khachaturian (1903-1978) occupy a special place in the history of Soviet ballet and of Soviet music. Considered along with Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev as one of the leaders of Soviet music, Khachaturian devoted many years to the creation of ballet, although in the end he produced only three ballet scores: Schast'e [Happiness], completed in 1939; Gayane, completed in 1942; and Spartak [Spartacus], completed in 1954. Of these three, Gayane and Spartacus (both repeatedly revised) were notably successful, both immediately acclaimed as important new achievements in the development of an identifiably Soviet ballet style. Taken on tour abroad by the Bolshoi Ballet in a revised version, Spartacus also became one of the most internationally successful ballets written by a Soviet composer, although it never came close to equaling the international recognition eventually achieved by Prokofiev's Soviet ballets Romeo and Juliet or Cinderella. Gayane was not widely staged outside the USSR, but some of the music from the ballet, arranged into three orchestral suites by the composer, became very popular internationally—particularly the “Sabre Dance,” which became the single most recognized piece of Khachaturian, recycled repeatedly in Hollywood film scores.

Reading the Ballerina's Body: Susan Bordo Sheds Light on Anastasia Volochkova and Heidi Guenther

In September of 2003, Bolshoi Ballet dancer and media star Anastasia Volochkova, 27, was fired from her job. The main reason given was that at 5′7″ and 110 lbs., she was too tall and too heavy for her partners to lift. Yekaterina Norikova, spokeswoman for the Bolshoi, said: “The problem is that male dancers complained of her height and weight and refused to dance with her” (quoted in Isachenkov 2003). Yevgeny Ivanchenko, her former partner, publicly declared her too heavy to lift, saying that he risked injury in working with her. The Russian newspaperVremya Novosteiused the headline “Not even bears could hold [her]” (Kishkovsky, 2003, A1).In her interviews with the press, she said that she is in excellent shape and follows a strict diet. “I don't eat ice cream now,” said Ms. Volochkova, who once told a Russian interviewer that she adores it. “I eat spinach leaves and vegetables.” She also declared that “Height and weight are not the test of a great ballerina” (2003, A1).