“Ballet Is a Flower”

Chapter 4 analyzes New York City Ballet’s (NYCB’s) 1962 tour of the Soviet Union and the Soviet reception of NYCB choreographer George Balanchine. Previous scholarly accounts have claimed the Soviet reviews of Balanchine’s works were heavily censored, and that, as a result, the tour undermined the authority of the Soviet government with the intelligentsia. Chapter 4 re-examines this tour, using transliteration as a way of modeling the Soviet response to Balanchine. This re-examination shows that Soviet cultural authorities were not at all hostile to the choreographer or his company. The Soviet critics mostly accepted Balanchine’s ballets, but they reframed his accomplishments within their own debates about drambalet and choreographic symphonism. According to Balanchine’s Soviet critics, his works were successful precisely because they reaffirmed the value of the Russian systems of training, artistry, and meaning.

Bringing an American Report Card to Russia

Chapter 2 analyzes American Ballet Theatre’s (ABT’s) often-overlooked 1960 tour of the Soviet Union. The tour took place under highly fraught circumstances. Ballet was considered a uniquely Russian art form in both the United States and the Soviet Union. At many points in the spring and summer of 1960, both the Soviet and American governments threatened to withdraw support from the tour. In dealing with these concerns, ABT director Lucia Chase developed a strategy for presenting her company and the United States as the leader of an international, elite art form. Through repertoire and casting choices, she balanced the troupe’s profile, showing it as both an international company and an American organization. Moreover, the company’s American works bore striking similarities to Soviet drambalety and were therefore praised by Russian critics for displaying common aesthetic and political values. Much to the surprise of everyone involved, the strategy was successful.

A Question of Taste

Chapter 3 explores the Bolshoi Ballet’s 1962 tour of the United States, which took place during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In the wake of the crisis, President Kennedy and his family staged numerous public meetings with the Bolshoi dancers to soothe the mounting political tensions. In the critical reception of the Bolshoi, however, a less conciliatory strain emerged. American critics understood the Soviet works through the lens of taste, a framework related to domestic struggles about the positioning of ballet in an aesthetic and class hierarchy. They disparagingly compared the Bolshoi’s new production of Spartacus to Hollywood epic films. These concerns were in turn related to a desire to foster the United States’ status as an emerging ideological empire.

A Cold War Welcome

Chapter 1 discusses the Bolshoi Theater’s first tour of the United States in 1959. While the popular response was rapturous, critics were more cautious. They praised the company’s dancers, particularly the Soviet ballerinas, but disparaged the choreography and music. This split was gendered and allowed critics and audiences to sympathize with the performers while condemning the ostensibly more political works themselves. The chapter focuses on Sergei Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet and Stone Flower. Because Prokofiev’s music was so well known in the West, tour organizers hoped that his music could mediate between American expectations for Russian ballet and newer Soviet models. However, the Soviet performers failed to convince Western critics that their ballet was sufficiently “modern,” a complaint that would permeate American criticisms of the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War.

Introduction

The Introduction argues that reception is key to understanding cultural diplomacy. Using an analogy to the process of transliteration, it shows that audiences interpreted cultural-exchange performances through the parameters set out by their own aesthetic backgrounds and expectations. Just as the sounds of one language are read through the symbols of another in the process of transliteration, so too in cultural exchange performances are sounds, gestures, and forms of a ballet read through the aesthetic contexts of the host country. During the Soviet-American ballet exchange, the resulting aesthetic misinterpretations determined the impact of a cultural diplomatic event. As such, the Introduction explains how dance and music impacted political attitudes during the Cold War. This then also provides a model for understanding the relationship between music, dance, and politics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Epilogue

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.