I︠A︡kobson Leonid - Like a bomb going off : Leonid Yakobson and ballet as resistance in Soviet Russia

Like a Bomb Going Off

Leonid Yakobson and Ballet as Resistance in Soviet Russia

Janice Ross

Foreword by Lynn Garafola

Copyright 2015 by Janice Ross. All rights reserved.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ross, Janice.
Like a bomb going off : Leonid Yakobson and ballet as resistance in
Soviet Russia / Janice Ross ; foreword by Lynn Garafola.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-300-20763-7 (hardback)
1. IAkobson, Leonid. 2. ChoreographersSoviet UnionBiography. 3. DancersSoviet UnionBiography. 4. BalletSoviet UnionHistory. 5. DancePolitical aspectsSoviet Union. I. Title.
GV1785.I17R67 2015
792.80947dc23 2014022306

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Frontispiece: Yakobson in rehearsal for Troika with dancers of his company,
Choreographic Miniatures, Leningrad, 1973. Photo: Anatoly Pronin.

Dedicated with love to the memories of Joshua Bartel and Keith Bartel

, by Lynn Garafola

Lynn Garafola

SOVIET DANCE HISTORY is full of muted voices, artists who spent decades in creative silence while keeping inner faith with the modernist ideals of the 1920s. Among this courageous group was Leonid Yakobson. A choreographer as crotchety as he was resolute, Yakobson was an artist of contradictions, a modernist who shed his early proletarian skin but continued to make war on ballet and use unconventional movement, even as he worked with Russias greatest ballet dancers. He made dances for the leading Soviet companies, but struggled for years to establish his own troupe, which became the first of its kind in the postwar Soviet Union. He was a Jew who created his first Jewish-themed dances in the late 1940s as Jews were being arrested as rootless cosmopolitans and bourgeois nationalists, yet he refused to emigrate even when it became possible to do so. He was a man with a profound sense of irony who seemed unfazed when a work of his disappeared at a censors pen stroke. He had an unquenchable desire to make dances. Denied a studio, he wrote libretti; even on his deathbed he awoke from a nap and told his wife that he had just made up a new ballet. He choreographed because he had to, and he believed that ballet mattered.

This contradictory and fascinating artist is the subject of Like a Bomb Going Off: Leonid Yakobson and Ballet as Resistance in Soviet Russia. Janice Ross, who teaches dance history at Stanford University, has already written two important books, both with an American twist. Moving Lessons: Margaret HDoubler and the Beginning of Dance in American Education (2000) is about the educator who established the first U.S. college dance department, and Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance (2007) focuses on the experimental California choreographer who became a pioneer of the dance healing movement.

In her most recent book, Ross ventures far from these American modern dance subjects to explore the rich and complex history of twentieth-century ballet and the even more complex history of the expressive arts in the Soviet Union. A tightly focused and fascinating study of Yakobsons work, the biography presents its subject through the multiple ideologies of which he was both a product and a critic, offering a view of him as an artist, a citizen, and a man of high-minded principle. A voice of dissent, as Ross calls him, Yakobson crossed swords with censors and cultural bureaucrats, staging resistance from within the most public vocabulary of compliance.

Yakobson launched himself into the debates of the late 1920s as a proletarian artist, a maker in dance of the new Soviet present. As the 1920s turned into the 1930s, however, the ideological ground began to shift. Ballet after ballet was held up to a distorting mirror of ideologies. Soon, artists and intellectuals began disappearing. During these years, Yakobson staged relatively little for the professional stage. Much of his choreography was for students and hence scrutinized less for ideological correctness. He was also dispatched to the provinces to transplant ballet culture from the metropole, an example of the ethnographic populism that went hand in hand with Soviet cultural imperialism beginning in the 1930s.

Until the mid-1940s Yakobson behaved like an exemplary Soviet artist. True, he was Jewish, but this did not appear to alter the trajectory of his career; it was simply one aspect of his identity. As Jews became the target of anti-Semitic campaigns in the late 1940s, however, Yakobsons position grew increasingly tenuous. He was denounced as a cosmopolitan and in 1951, only weeks after winning the Stalin Prize for his ballet Shurale, dismissed from the Kirov Theater. Meanwhile, attacks on formalism were stepped up, and the screws on artistic expression tightened. After World War II only a fraction of Yakobsons ballets reached the stage. While others might have lost heart, Yakobson persisted. He became increasingly adept, Ross tells us, at playing with totalitarian discourse and challenging the idea that it was a completely suffocating ideological container for artists. His heroism was that of the rsistant.

Despite the constraints, Yakobson kept up a steady stream of work. For a new Moldavian folk ensemble in Kishinev, whose Jewish population was decimated by the Nazis, he choreographed a suite of Jewish dances that sought to preserve a vanishing culture through performance. He created dances inspired by Isadora Duncans technique, which was still taught in Moscow in the late 1940s. By far his most important project of the 1950s was Spartacus. With music by Aram Khachaturian, who dithered for more than a decade, and a libretto by Nikolai Volkov, the ballet was a plum assignment that came to Yakobson only when Fyodor Lopukhov became director of the Kirov after Stalins death in 1953.

A success at home, Spartacus flopped abroad. Opening the Bolshois 1962 New York season, it became entangled in Cold War discourse, with Allan Hughes at the New York Times and Walter Terry at the New York Herald-Tribune taking potshots at the ballets dull pageantry and non-dancey choreography. Yakobson was devastated. It was the first time he had been allowed out of the Soviet Union, his first time in New York since 1920, and he had counted on American plaudits to bolster his position at home. Now his tormentors had been handed a trump card. In ballerina Maya Plisetskayas dressing room at the old Met, Yakobson wept.

The Thaw that followed Stalins death allowed a modicum of artistic and intellectual freedom. Books like Solzhenitsyns One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) were published, and the music of once-proscribed composers was heard in concert halls and on the ballet stage. As historians dug into modernisms forbidden past, Yakobson staged