LORIN JOHNSON

EARLY RUSSIAN MODERN : LEV LUKIN AND THE MOTOBIO-SKUL'PTURA*

Though the artistic legacy of the Russia avant-garde has been extensively researched, discussed and packaged for public consumption, several areas of creative activity remain relatively unexplored. Perhaps chief among these is the subject of avant-garde dance, which flourished from the immediate pre- revolutionary years up until the end of the 1920s and paralleled experimentation in the West with ground breaking experiments in . As a temporal art form that went largely unrecorded in Russia in the early twentieth century, dance must be reconstructed by the historian in large. part from archival materials consisting of written descriptions and still photographs - materials that can never do justice to a moving dancer in space. It is perhaps for this reason that few scholars have succeeded in defin- ing the dance innovations of such early twentieth-century radical choreogra- phers as Alexander Rurnnev, Ludmilla Alekseeva, Inna Chemetskaia and Lev Lukin, though their contribution to contemporary dance should not be under- estimated In terms of scholarship uniquely devoted to Lukin, Natalia Voskresen- skaia's article for Experiment, vol. 2 (1996), "Lev Lukin and the Moscow Free ," remains a singular achievement in bringing to light the impor- tant work of this still mostly unknown choreographer. Lukin should indeed be considered a Russian modern dance pioneer and can confidently be placed alongside the more well-known names of Mary Wigman, Rudolph Von La- ban, Isadora Duncan, Ted Shawn or Ruth St. Denis for creating which

* The author wishes to express his thanks to John E. Bowlt and Nicoletta Misler for their comments on an earlier draft of this article. 1. There have been some very notable achievements in this area, however. Elizaveta Surits' ground-breaking book, Khoreograficheskoe iskusstvo dvndtsatykh godov (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1979), was a watershed in bringing to light the contributions of Russian experimental choreogra- phers previously misnamed "dilettantes" or "formalists." In 1999, Nicoletta Misler achieved the monumental task of assembling and presenting rare photographs of such previously unknown Russian artists as Alexander Rumnev, Inna Chemetskaia and Vera Maiia, for her exhibition enti- tled, In principe era il corpo ... (In the beginning there was the body). These photographs have been preserved in the catalogue of the exhibition by the same name, and remain a foundational resource for scholars seeking to understand the stylistic nuances of early Russian modern dance practitioners. See Nicoletta Misler, In principio era il corpo ..., (Milano: Electa,1999). heralded future developments in contemporary dance and ballet. Lukin's own company, "The Moscow Free Ballet," performed to audiences both within and outside of Moscow in the 1920s, traveling to Kiev, Baku and Tblisi with an expressionistic style of modem dance that had never before been seen in Russia. The personal archive of Lev Lukin (Lev Ivanovich Saks [1892-1961]), now in the State Bakhrushin Theatrical Museum, Moscow, confronts the re- searcher with numerous typed and handwritten notes, letters and librettos by the choreographer which expound on theoretical questions and proposals re- garding the future of contemporary ballet in Russia. The content of these ma- terials generates the dual impression of Lukin as a dedicated theoretician of dance as well as a modem dance practitioner - simultaneously striving to give "flesh and blood" to his ideas in the studio while working out his theo- ries in notebooks and self-created "books" of loosely assembled paper. One such "book" is comprised of numerous sheets of paper within a self-styled cover on which "Ob iskusstve baleta" (On the Art of Ballet) is written by hand. Another collection is entitled "0 tantseval'nom iskusstve, balete i pr. Rabochie materialy k sist'emam" (On the Art of Dancing, Ballet and so forth. Working Materials on Systems), which expound on Lukin's personal thoughts on dance. Materials such as these are a precious resource for under- standing the thoughts of a man so often relegated to amateur status by critics, and whose observations range from the importance of film a홢 a means to pre- serve choreography to the lack of reliable secondary criticism on dance the- ory for the further education of emerging dancers. Personal notes are also found, lending his notes the feel of a diary, which range from poetic stanzas (some in English) to isolated statements that seem to reflect his own boredom or loneliness. Random thoughts include "la-Lukin" (I am Lukin), or "Talant - eto bolezn' (Talent is a sickness), along with a poem that ends: "It is difficult to live so long, guessing 'to be or not to be.' Poor Hamlet."2 Aside from a handful of photographs and eye witness accounts, however, very little remains of the actual choreographic output of Lukin. There are no known documentary films in existence that might corroborate his theoretical ideas in terms of actual movement on stage. Aside from this author's interpretive sequence dedicated to Lukin (see film clip "Moto-Bio" on accompanying CD-ROM) not a single reconstruction or restaging is currently available to demonstrate his movement, and it appears that neither his students nor his contemporaries made concerted efforts to keep his dances alive. 홢 `

2. Lev Lukin, Blaknod s zapisiami, middle of the twentiethth century, p. 10. Fond No. 718 (no catalogue number available), From the Lukin archive in the Bakhrushin State Central Theat- rical Museum, Moscow.