International Arts News: ‘Bolt,’ at Gallery for Russian Arts and Design in London - New York Times (13-01-2015) nytimes/2015/01/14/arts/bolt-at-gallery-for-russian-arts-and-design-in-london.html By ROSLYN SULCAS For most in the West, ballet history moves from the establishment of classicism in Russia in the 19th century (“Swan Lake,” “Sleeping Beauty”) to the early-20th-century innovations of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, which shifted the center of balletic gravity to the West. But while the radical propositions of Fokine, Nijinsky and Balanchine were playing out under the Ballets Russes banner in Paris and London during the first decades of the 20th century, an entirely different current and aesthetic — almost completely unknown and unseen outside of Russia — was flourishing under Soviet rule. The exhibition “Bolt,” at the Gallery for Russian Arts and Design here, gives vivid life to one ballet of that era and to the way it exemplified a particular cultural moment in postrevolutionary Soviet Russia. “The Bolt,” choreographed in 1931 by Fyodor Lopukhov to a score by Shostakovich, with designs by Tatiana Bruni, has a strange history. Despite an unimpeachable narrative — an idle saboteur plans to throw a bolt into factory machinery but is prevented from doing so by worthy workers — the ballet was banned after one performance. Lopukhov was forced to resign as director of the Leningrad State Academic Ballet (as the Mariinsky was then known). Shostakovich, then just 25, never heard his score performed again. What was so wrong with “The Bolt”? It’s difficult, looking at this exhibition’s wonderfully colorful Bruni designs, and the faded, evocative photographs of rehearsals and scenery construction, to work out why the creators fell afoul of Soviet orthodoxy. You need to look at the excellent online accompaniment to the exhibition (there is an app), or have access to specialized literature on Soviet ballet for the salient context. High-profile trials of saboteurs in 1930 made the plot highly topical. The authorities believed in dance as a potent, accessible medium of propaganda, fueling postrevolutionary experimentation and ferment. “Machine” and “industrial” dances had been staged by the choreographer Nikolai Foregger. The theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold developed a physical training regimen called biomechanics inspired by the factory assembly line. Lopukhov and other choreographers were deeply influenced by these ideas and the passionate commitment to revolutionary art by figures like the filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. But “The Bolt,” with its comic antihero, broad-stroke villains (the Lazy Idler, the Petty Bourgeois Woman, the Terrorist) and its dancing young Communists and Red Cavalry, seems to have gone a satirical step too far just at the moment when Socialist Realism was making its appearance as official cultural policy. (“Who knows what the attitude towards such a ballet might have been if it had appeared not in the early 1930s but a decade earlier,” the critic Elizabeth Souritz wrote in “Soviet Choreographers in the 1920s.”) A critic for The Worker and the Theater called it “a grotesque dancification of everyday life.” Lopukhov’s choreography was deemed vulgar, acrobatic and distorted; Shostakovich’s music, with its popular tunes and nods to jazz and the tango, corrupted by Western influence. The frightening term formalism — code for anything considered subversive — was mentioned. Alexei Ratmansky choreographed a version of “The Bolt” in 2005 while he was director of the Bolshoi Ballet and particularly concerned with reviving historically important Soviet work. (“Bright Stream,” a 1935 Shostakovich-Lopukhov collaboration that he rechoreographed in 2003, has been seen far more widely and is in the repertoire of American Ballet Theater, where Mr. Ratmansky is artist in residence.) But Mr. Ratmansky’s “Bolt,” which has designs by Semyon Pastukh and costumes by Galina Solovyov, is not a reconstruction. In an interview on a DVD recording of the ballet, he describes his version as a contemporary one, and talks about the changes he has made both to story and content to render them legible to modern audiences. The libretto might not have been particularly legible in 1931, either. In his memoirs, Lopukhov speculated that the failure of the ballet was due to its complicated plot, by Victor Smirnov. “Comrade Smirnov has read me the libretto,” Shostakovich wrote sarcastically in a letter to a friend. “Its theme is extremely relevant. There once was a machine. Then it broke down (problem of material decay). Then it was mended (problem of revitalization), and at the same time they bought a new one. Then everybody dances around the new machine. Apotheosis. This all takes up three acts.” The London exhibition, which comes from the archives of the St. Petersburg State Museum of Theater and Music, largely centers on Bruni’s drawings of the extravagantly vivid costumes. They are rendered in glorious blocks of color that give immediate and humorous life to the ballet’s cast of characters: a Textile Worker with a fighter aircraft emblazoned across his shirt; a Bureaucrat carries his paraphernalia-laden desk; a Drunkard with one bottle in a pocket and another in hand; an Invalid with a bulky foot in plaster, a bright yellow sling for one arm. The caricature vigor of the drawings, with their blocky, geometric forms, shows the influences of Constructivist art as well as Soviet propaganda posters and Futurist theater design. Next to them, the grainy, sepia photographs of the dancers and backstage crew seem poignantly evanescent. But in a few of these images — notably one of five dancers grouped in a pose that evokes the dynamic, geometric energy and clarity of Lopukhov’s choreography — we get a tantalizing glimpse of what the ballet might have been like. This “Bolt” exhibition doesn’t offer many more clues to what went wrong in 1931. But it does give a vivid and moving glimpse of the creative fervor, experimental spirit and enterprise of a work that would live for just a few hours onstage, and of an era in ballet history that is still mostly unknown.
Posted on: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 04:01:43 +0000
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