SLAVIC 121: Ballet, Past and Present

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TDM 121K/Slavic 121

Ballet, Past and Present

 

Spring 2024. Class meets TTh 1:30pm - 2:45pm, location Sever 109.

Instructor: Daria Khitrova (Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures)

My email is dkhitrova@fas.harvard.edu (Please write to me with any questions before or during the course)

Office hours: Th 3:30-4:30pm, Barker 369

TF: María Matilde Morales (mmoralesguzman@g.harvard.edu)

Office hours: T 10:30 AM - 12:30 PM & by appointment (Barker 340) 

Sections: T 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM (Sever 106); W 4:30 - 5:30 PM (Sever 104)

 

In this class, we will trace the history of ballet focusing on the time period from the late 19th to early 20th century when ballet’s core repertoire both classical and modern, was established. Each week we will be watching and analyzing individual ballets, from Giselle to The Rite of Spring and beyond, combining a micro-analysis (down to single variations and on to specific gestures and pas) with thinking about bigger questions of ballet as an institution. How do ballets survive, and how they change in the process? How did it happen that the dancing style relevant in the seventeenth-century court etiquette is still alive the twenty-first? How did ballet fight for the status of art? Do movements “mean” anything and how do we get to find this meaning? Who control what is danced: choreographers or dancers?

Topics and issues to be discussed include: the politics of ballet, starting from imperial court spectacles to global cold-war competition; the creation and permanent recreation of the classical repertoire; give and take between ballet and modern dance; music and visual arts in the framework of ballet production; the national and the universal in ballet; ballet’s favorite narratives—from feasts and rituals to dying, flying, and lovemaking; the bipolar order of ballet as an art form: the bodily versus the spiritual; spectacle versus narrative; dance versus pantomime; motion versus immobility.

I currently am coordinating with Boston Ballet for the number of fun activities such as visiting their rehearsals as well as going to their costume shop. This should culminate in going to see their performance. We will set the date in class and go together at no cost for you.

Last but not least: Houghton Library has a unique collection of choreographic notations (scores) of many classical ballets. Following leading choreographers of today, we will make a trip there to hear about it from Irina Klyagin, the main archivist in charge of the collection. We will even have a chance to participate in the online project of the digitization and annotation of the collection.

 

  • No training or any other prerequisites are required to take the class – we will be watching and analyzing, not dancing.
  • Attendance, participation and readings (all available through Canvas) will be required. Each Thursday I will let you know through Canvas about reading and watching assignments for the upcoming week.

 

Assignments (to be submitted by email to Prof. Khitrova and Matilde):

 

  • A critical review (2-3 pp.) of a recorded or live dance performance will count for your mid-term after Week 7.
  • Alternatively, you can envision and write a one-page synopsis for an imaginary ballet. Feel free to use any topic or story you like. Structure your synopsis in terms of scenes. Be prepared to characterize the visual and kinetic style of your imaginary ballet. Use pictures, made or found, to suggest what the scenery will look like; audio examples are welcome too. If people volunteer, we can make them available to the class and exchange creative ideas about your synopsis.
  • By the end of the term, you will have to write a seminar paper (12-15 pp.) on any subject related to the course (please discuss your subject with me before you start). A proposal for the final paper is to be handed in by week 10, so that I can give you a written feedback in advance of the final paper.
  • Final deadline: May 8 for students graduating this semester, May 11 for others

 

Preliminary schedule

 

Week 1: Introduction.

What is ballet and where did it come from?

 

Weeks 2 and 3. The Creation of Classics. Ballet at the court.

The Sleeping Beauty as it was born in 1890 and as it was woken throughout the 20th century.

Read:

  • Lynn Garafola, “Russian Ballet in the Age of Petipa,” in Cambridge Companion to Ballet, pp. 151-163;
  • “La Belle au Bois Dormant,” in Lincoln Kirstein, Metaphor and Movement: Four Centuries of Ballet, pp. 174-5.
  • “Sleeping Beauty: Ballet-Féerie as Gesamtkunstwerk,” in Tim Scholl, From Petipa to Balanchine, pp. 17-36.

 

Week 4 (or TBD). Dance Hieroglyphics: ballet archives and onstage reconstructions.

A field trip to Houghton Library. Irina Klyagin, the ballet archivist at the Harvard Theatrical Collection, will show us original choreographic notations for The Sleeping Beauty on which the reconstruction we are analyzing in class is based.

Read: “Red Auroras” and “Bringing Beauty Back,” in Tim Scholl, Sleeping Beauty: The Legend in Progress, pp. 101-73.

 

Week 5. Romantic Ballet:  Spirituality of the Body.

La Sylphide. Giselle of 1841 and three Giselles of the 20th century.

Watch: Giselle (by any major company)

Read:

  • Chapter 5, in Robert Greskovic, Ballet 101, pp. 28-35.
  • “Giselle, ou Les Wilis,” in Lincoln Kirstein, Metaphor and Movement: Four Centuries of Ballet, pp. 150-1.
  • “Elegy” and “The Weeping Spirit,” in Akim Volynsky, Ballet’s Magic Kingdom, pp. 53-7 and 90-5.

 

Week 6. Mystics and Myths in Ballet. Swan Lake, music versus choreography.

Watch: Swan Lake (preferably, by Mariinsky Ballet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfrYFF0whhQ)

Read:

  • “Swan Lake: The Swan in Music,” in Akim Volynsky, Ballet’s Magic Kingdom, pp. 107-10;
  • “Aristocratic Maximalism: Ballet from Sixteenth-Century France to Nineteenth-Century Russia,” in Richard Taruskin, Music in Early Twentieth Century, pp. 131-46.

 

Week 7. Spectacle and Narrative in Ballet.

Performer as Choreographer: the case of The Dying Swan (1905 or 1907).

Watch: as many Dying Swan performances as you want/can find on YouTube, starting from Anna Pavlova’s

Read: “The Swan,” in Jane Pritchard, Anna Pavlova: The Twentieth-Century Ballerina, pp. 167-71.

 

After week 7: your mid-term papers are due.

 

Week 8. “New Ballet.”

First seasons of Ballets Russes. Painters and Musicians gather to create a new art of dancing. Isadora Duncan’s influence. Michel Fokine’s reforms. The problem of exoticism.

Watch:

Read:

  • “Ballet Ruse: The Dying Swan,” in Tim Scholl, From Petipa to Balanchine, pp. 37-53;
  • “The Dance and Its Inspiration,” in Isadora Speaks, pp. 41-6.
  • excerpts from Michel Fokine, Memoirs of a Ballet Master, pp. 99-105, 128-35, 148-51.

 

Week 9. Revolution in the Pit. Early Stravinsky. “Russian Ballet”?! Firebird.

Watch:

 

Read:

  • the rest of “Aristocratic Maximalism: Ballet from Sixteenth-Century France to Nineteenth-Century Russia,” in Richard Taruskin, Music in Early Twentieth Century, pp. 146-90.

 

Week 10: Nov 1st and 3rd. Ballet Turned In. The Nijinsky siblings, Vaslav and Bronislava.

Watch:

 

Read:

  • Millicent Hodson, “Searching for Le Sacre,” in Moving History/ Dancing Cultures, pp. 17-29.
  • Igor Stravinsky, “What I Wished to Express in The Consecration of Spring (1913)” and Excerpts from “An Autobiography” (1934), in Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources, pp. 237-42.
  • Robert Johnson, “Ritual and Abstraction in Nijinska’s Les Noces,” in Dance Chronicle (vol. 10, 1987), pp. 147-69.

 

 

Week 11. Balanchine before America.

Watch:

  • Apollo (1928): will be uploaded to the Canvas website.

 

Read: “Two Apollos,” in Tim Scholl, From Petipa to Balanchine, pp. 62-80; Nancy Goldner,

“Balanchine's Apollo and the Paradox of Performance,” Raritan 34: 4 (Spring 2015), 118-27.

 

Week 12 and 13. East and West: Drama or no Drama.

Soviet Drambalet vs. Abstract Classical Dance in the West. Romeo and Juliet (1940), Symphony in C (1947).

Watch:

  • Romeo and Juliet (1940, 1954)
  • Symphony in C (1947): will be uploaded to the Canvas website.

 

Read: “Ideological Pressure: Classical Ballet and Soviet Cultural Politics,” in Christina Ezrahi, Swans of the Kremlin, pp. 30-66.

 

Week 14. Final Discussion.

 

 

Course Summary:

Date Details Due