Dancing the Cold War an International Symposium
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Dancing the Cold War An International Symposium Sponsored by the Barnard College Dance Department and the Harriman Institute, Columbia University Organized by Lynn Garafola February 16-18, 2017 tContents Lynn Garafola Introduction 4 Naima Prevots Dance as an Ideological Weapon 10 Eva Shan Chou Soviet Ballet in Chinese Cultural Policy, 1950s 12 Stacey Prickett “Taking America’s Story to the World” Ballets: U.S.A. during the Cold War 23 Stephanie Gonçalves Dien-Bien-Phu, Ballet, and Politics: The First Sovviet Ballet Tour in Paris, May 1954 24 Harlow Robinson Hurok and Gosconcert 25 Janice Ross Outcast as Patriot: Leonid Yakobson’s Spartacus and the Bolshoi’s 1962 American Tour 37 Tim Scholl Traces: What Cultural Exchange Left Behind 45 Julia Foulkes West and East Side Stories: A Musical in the Cold War 48 Victoria Phillips Cold War Modernist Missionary: Martha Graham Takes Joan of Arc and Catherine of Siena “Behind the Iron Curtain” 65 Joanna Dee Das Dance and Decolonization: African-American Choreographers in Africa during the Cold War 65 Elizabeth Schwall Azari Plisetski and the Spectacle of Cuban-Soviet Exchanges, 1963-73 72 Sergei Zhuk The Disco Effect in Cold-War Ukraine 78 Video Coverage of Sessions on Saturday, February 18 Lynn Garafola’s Introduction Dancers’ Roundatble 1-2 The End of the Cold War and Historical Memory 1-2 Alexei Ratmansky on his Recreations of Soviet-Era Works can be accessed by following this link. Introduction Lynn Garafola Thank you, Kim, for that wonderfully concise In the Cold War struggle for hearts and minds, – and incisive – overview, the perfect start to a people outside the corridors of power played a symposium that seeks to explore the role of dance huge part. When the Moiseyev Dance Ensemble in the many global theaters of the Cold War. David first toured the United States, the dancers were Caute, in The Dancer Defects, a wide-ranging mobbed when they bought teddy bears for their volume about the Cold War struggle for supremacy children; Americans invited them home, believing in many realms of cultural activity, devotes his that people-to-people diplomacy was the way to one chapter on dance to the high-profile defections peace. Dancers were diplomats; in their dresses that, beginning with Rudolf Nureyev’s “leap to and pumps they met artists and dignitaries. They freedom” in 1961, captured so many headlines. performed in opera houses and on improvised But as we will see in the next two days, there was stages, giving full-scale performances and lecture- more – far more – to the story than defections demonstrations – sometimes to people who had and far more even than ballet, although ballet never glimpsed ballet or modern dance before, or certainly played a big part in Cold War battles witnessed performances by a company of African- for supremacy. Musicals like West Side Story and American virtuosi. At a time before mass air travel, dances like the Twist belonged as much to the they traversed oceans and continents, encountered Cold War imaginary as events at the Bolshoi or strange foods, languages, and customs. They the old Met that began with the playing of national became members of a global dance culture. anthems and even, on occasion, the display of The cultural Cold War has become a minor national flags. Movie theaters and television were cottage industry. But when Naima Prevots also battlegrounds, with millions of Americans published Dance for Export: Cultural Diplomacy tuning in to the Ed Sullivan Show for their first and the Cold War in 1998, it was the first book to glimpse of real Russian dancers. examine the phenomenon with respect to dance. Although the United States and the USSR were Since then a number of scholars have followed in the main protagonists of the Cold War, they were her footsteps, and several will be giving papers on not its only ones. The ideological struggle that was their work at this symposium. Dancing the Cold said to pit capitalist freedom against communist War had its inception two years ago when the late oppression took place on many fronts and involved and sorely missed Catharine Nepomnyashchy allies, clients, and surrogates of those countries in and I curated a symposium on Russian movement different parts of the world. The two powers dueled cultures of the 1920s and 1930s. The event was at festivals in Africa, Western Europe, and the multidisciplinary in that it prominently featured Middle East. Master teachers and choreographers both visual iconography and film. This time, in were dispatched, and students sent to metropoles. addition to film, photographs, and memorabilia, Companies large and small embarked on long we will be hearing from dancers from ten US tours, spreading the gospel of dance along with companies who took part in multiple Cold War a dose of ideology, earning foreign currency for tours, as well as Soviet-trained artists who have their governments or budget relief for themselves, pursued post-Cold War careers outside Russia. We and contributing to the international visibility of are also fortunate in being able to share Cold War the dance boom. Many breathed a sigh of relief images from the remarkable collection of Robert when they returned home, but over the years the Greskovic and to show a film of Balanchine’s exposure to other repertories and other training Western Symphony, specially loaned to us by the regimes could be felt in the globalization of works, Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York performance styles, and techniques. Public Library for the Performing Arts, which was 4 made in Paris in 1956 with Cold War dollars. Tonight we begin with another Cold War film, Plisetskaya Dances, about the legendary Bolshoi ballerina, Maya Plisetskaya. It was made in 1964 by Moscow’s Central Documentary Film Studio and introduces us to the star who blazed so brightly over the international dance firmament. In Moscow she danced Swan Lake for innumerable foreign leaders, including Fidel Castro (shown on the symposium program and poster after a performance). Abroad she danced it to ecstatic crowds. We know from her memoir, I, Maya Plisetskaya, that her path was not easy. Her father was killed in the late 1930s, and she danced her firstDying Swan (or something that approximated it) at an outdoor concert in the city of Chimkent before an audience of political exiles, including her mother. She was denied permission to take part in the Bolshoi’s 1956 tour of London because one of her father’s brothers had settled in New York, had children, and grown prosperous. None of this appears in the film, of course.What you see instead is the magnificent Bolshoi ballerina, with her outsized temperament and splendid jumps, a dancer who had scaled the heights of international fame but remained at heart deeply Russian. Dancing the Cold War: Images from the 1950s and 1960s Masterpieces of the Twentieth-Century Festival, Paris, 1952 Flyer for extra performances of the Virgil Thomson-Gertrude Stein opera Four Saints in Three Acts at the Master- pieces of the Twentieth-Century Festival. Choreographed by William Dollar, the work featured Arthur Mitchell as one of the dancers. Also part of the festival, which was organized by the composer Nicholas Nabokov and spon- sored by the CIA-financed Congress for Cultural Freedom, was the NewYork City Ballet, making its Paris debut. Arthur Mitchell Collection, Columbia University Libraries. Masterpieces of the Twentieth-Century Festival, Paris, 1952 “City Ballet Bows at Paris Festival,” New York Times, 11 May 1952. For its Paris debut , the company performed Balanchine’s Swan Lake (identified here as “Lev Ivanov’s) and La Valse and Jerome Robbins’ The Cage, described as a work “with violent and controversial movements.” The season also included Balanchine’s Firebird, Orpheus, and Prodigal Son. 6 New York City Ballet, 1958-59 New York City Ballet souvenir program, showing the Manhattan skyline. In 1958 the company made a five-month tour of Japan, Australia, and Philippines, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State. 7 Leonard Bernstein in Moscow, 1959 Classical music artists also took part in Cold War exchanges. Here , Leonard Bernstein, composer and conductor of the New York Philharmonic, is surrounded by fans in Moscow. 8 American Ballet Theatre, Moscow, 1960 Members of the American Ballet Theatre take a curtain call after a performance in Moscow, 1960. ABT was the first U.S. dance company to perform in the Soviet Union. It followed tours by the Royal Ballet (1956) and the Paris Opera Ballet (1958). 9 Dance as an Ideological Weapon: Comments by Moderator Naima Prevots These comments were made after all four pan- of us who saw these performances, we will elists presented their papers. never forget not only the brilliant virtuosity on stage, but also the connections made with all I graduated from college in 1955 and the the people watching, for whom Soviet Russia Cold War was omnipresent and scary. It seems had been as distant and strange as Mars. The hard for those who did not live through those company’s tour was made possible by the 1958 years to imagine how consistently we were Lacy-Zarubin agreement between the Sovi- told that the Soviet Union was a dangerous et Union and the United States, a landmark enemy, and that people living there could not initiative for supporting exchange. The Soviet be our friends. Soviet populations were told Union could no longer be identified only as an the same thing, and certainly, at that time, there enemy for millions who saw the company in seemed little hope of significant exchange and person and on the Ed Sullivan show. interaction. My father was born in Russia, and Stacey Prickett’s presentation focused on came to the United States in 1923.