Mapping the Feminine: Russian Women and Cultural Difference

Dance as Metaphor: The Russian Ballerina and the Imperial Imagination

Dance as Metaphor: The Russian Ballerina and the Imperial Imagination Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy POCOI" - OjHIHKC. JIM,,)," M CKop651, 11 06AMBa.HCh QepHoi1: KPOBbIO, OHa fAJIAMT, I"A5IAl1T, rA5l A,l1T B Te6M 11 C HeHalH1CTbIO, 11 C AI06oBbIO! ... - AAeKca HAp EAOK, «CKl1qn,l» We had an imperial ballet and we returned to an imperial ballet. -Elizaveta Iakovlevna Smits1 Stagings of the imaginary geography of nationhood may take on particular resonance in situations when group identities are rendered vulnerable or contested by rapid social or political change or by encounters with outsiders. At such pivotal moments, dramatic spectacle may become a potent mechanism for working out in symbolic terms shifts in power relations. Ballet has played a remarkably prominent role in the past century in defining Russia for the world outside-from the spectacular debut of Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Paris in 1909 to the Cold War visits of Soviet ballet troupes to the West decades later. The function of ballet within the Soviet Union to represent and thereby legitimate the consolidation of state power has received less attention . This article attempts merely to start the conversation by su ggesting how we might look fruitfully at paradigmatic continuities and discontinuities among the late imperial ballet, the Diaghilev enterprise, and the coming of age of Soviet ballet in the years following the 1917 Revolution in terms of their representation of empire and nation, Russian and foreign. The points of orientation of my argument will be gaze, gender, and the enactment of real power through symbolic imaginaries. 1 A faithful paraphrase of a personal communication on ballet in Russia before and after the 1917 Revolution (6 February 2001). Mapping the Feminine: Russian Women and Cultural Difference. Hilde Hoogenboom, Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, and Irina Reyfman, eds. Bloomington, IN: Siavica Publishers, 2008, 185- 208. 186 CATHARINE THEIMER NEPOMNYASHCHY Figure 1. Liubov Tchnicheva as Cleopatra2 Gaze, Gender, and the Ballerina In her excellent study Genderil1g Bodies/Performing Art: Dance and Literature in Early Twentieth-Century British Cuiture, Amy Koritz observes that "the conventions governing gender in ballet tended to maintain strict divisions between gender roles" and that "[b]allet performance, as opposed to choreography, has traditionally been dominated by women." She asserts that "the cultural position of dance as an eroticized female space catering to male visual pleasure " was defined by the focal role of the ballerina, flanked by the female corps de ballet, feeding the male spectator's "fantasy of possession," with the ballerina 's male consort (sometimes in Britain danced by a female dancer in travesty ) a mere support, no "competitor."3 This paradigm of the ballerina as an objectified, submissive body vulnerable to the voyeurism and sexual predation of the male spectator is graphically depicted in a late eighteenth-century Russian painting portraying the "training of a serf dancer," in which the male spectator, presumably the patriarch of the estate, gazes through his lorgnette under the hem of the maiden's skirt, her leg conveniently stretched out in a balletic pose to permit a clear view of her "private parts" (see figure 2). 2 Svetlov, "Diaghileff Ballet in Paris," 263. 3 Koritz, Gelldering Bodies/Perjormillg Art, 23, 24. DANCE AS METAPHOR 187 Figure 2. Education ofa Self Dancer4 By unknown artist, late eighteenth century. Yet, I would suggest, there is a tension inherent in this paradigm, which becomes progressively more unstable and intense as the role of the ballerina becomes more central in the course of the nineteenth century. A hint of this tension is already evident in the disjuncture between Pushkin's famous conflation of the"dance" of the Onegin stanza with the virtuosity of the ballerina Avdot'ia Istomina (1799-1848) in chapter 1, stanza XX of Eugene Onegin, on the one hand, and his own less than reverent comment in a private letter, from the point of view of a balletomane and connoisseur of the sexual demimonde of the Petersburg ballet of his time, on the other. The two are juxtaposed under a portrait of Istomina below (see figure 3): 4 Surits, Russkii bale! i ego zvezdy, 17. 188 CATHARINE THEIMER N EPOMNYASHCHY Figure 3. A. I. Istomina in the role of Flora. Unknown artist.5 5 Belova et aI., Russkii balet, 204. DANCE AS METAPHOR 189 TeaTp ylK IIOJIOH; JIOlKli 6JIeIl.\YT; IIapTep II KpeCJIa- BCe KllIIllT; B paillie HeTepIIeJIllBO IIJIeIl.\YT, 11, B3BHBllIICb, 3aHaBeC llYMllT. EJIliCTaTeJIhHa, IIOJIYB03AYIIIHa, CMhl'IKY BOJIlIIe6HOMY IIOCJIYIIIHa, TOJIIIOIO HllM- HO...