Impossible project : the story of Russian ballet and its survival /
"Writing in 1829, a Russian critic referred to the art of ballet as an impossible project--impossible because it strives "to give an expressive language to body movements," while completely avoiding spoken dialogue. This impossibility, of which both ballet professionals and aficionado...
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| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
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New York, NY :
Oxford University Press,
[2025]
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| Online Access: | Connect to the full text of this electronic book |
| Summary: | "Writing in 1829, a Russian critic referred to the art of ballet as an impossible project--impossible because it strives "to give an expressive language to body movements," while completely avoiding spoken dialogue. This impossibility, of which both ballet professionals and aficionados were acutely aware from the mid-nineteenth century on, generated an anxiety of survival that, no less than the balletic triumphs typically addressed in historiography, has been fueling ballet's existence to this day. This book follows the ballet debates from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, showing that it was this energy of survival, particularly felt by the French-trained ballet masters working in Russia, that turned danse d'école--also known as classical dance, that backbone of ballet--into something like a religion for its practitioners in late nineteenth-century Russia. The modernist dissent of the early twentieth century only reinforced, as religious dissent often does, the devotion of the balletic parish, who moreover soon found themselves exiled by revolution to form, as a French critic had it in 1939, the Russian companies who run from capital to capital, carrying the flame of an art become religion."-- |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource : illustrations (some color) |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780197653081 0197653081 9780197653067 0197653065 9780197653074 0197653073 |