Published article

Freedom in Dance

Simon Morrison · The Times Literary Supplement

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Summary

Simon Morrison reviews three studies of Russian dance through the recurring conflict between expressive meaning and abstract virtuosity. Daria Khitrova argues that Russian ballet repeatedly returned to Jean-Georges Noverre’s ideal of harmonizing gesture, thought, and emotion whenever pure form threatened intelligibility, though Morrison faults her for omitting Soviet ballet. Elena Yushkova reconstructs Isadora Duncan’s Russian career and Moscow school while challenging misogynistic and sensationalized accounts of her decline; Irina Sirotkina traces the women-led free-dance studios that extended Duncan’s bodily and spiritual ideals before Stalinist repression. Morrison judges the latter books especially valuable for showing that Duncan’s liberating “natural” movement was paradoxically based on an imagined past and became anti-modernist in its resistance to Soviet mechanization and abstraction.

Highlights

In his own productions, he promised to achieve a harmony of gesture, thought and “the movements of the soul”.
“They are dancing because they are mending their nets, they are dancing because they are preparing the boat, they are dancing because they are villagers and, in this capacity, they must dance”. Ballet should leave those people alone, he implies. They’ve been working all day, their hands and feet are swollen, they feel lousy. The last thing they want to do is put on a show for the elite.
Nevertheless, for many Russian viewers, the most valuable freedom achieved by dance was aspirational – the way it reached for the spiritual beyond.
He challenged the hierarchy that placed the virtuosic prima ballerina and her partner at the top, with the corps de ballet at the bottom and coryphées serving as minor characters.
Why not do away with ballet altogether, by returning to that ancient time when, she imagined, dance was an incantational communal enactment? Why not begin movement from the solar plexus, angling the body towards the sun? Why not shed footwear and corsets for the slimmest, most translucent of tunics? Balletomanes considered her vile. She thought the same of them.
O, she is coming, the dancer of the future: the free spirit, who will inhabit the body of new women; more glorious than any woman that has yet been; more beautiful than the Egyptian, than the Greek, the early Italian, than all woman in past centuries: The highest intelligence in the freest body!
“It’s late autumn”, Alexander Yablonovsky said of a tired-looking recital in 1924, “but the rooks have yet to fly away.”
Then there is this malicious description in the newspaper Segodnya: “instead of bread, medicine, and hygiene, combinations of movement of ancient dance were given to children exhausted by hunger, worn out by diseases, and eaten by insects. Even the Bolsheviks soon grew tired of this vile comedy and ceased the subsidy they had generously promised at the beginning”.
These were as ephemeral as dance itself, no sooner opened than closed, sometimes because the studios had no heat, other times because the women (and these innovative performers were all women) were kicked out by men seeking spaces to create “machine” dances mimicking locomotives, punch pressers and steam threshers.
Duncan’s afterlife matters to Sirotkina more than her life. This is not the “Hellenic” afterlife, however, full of clichés about barefoot dancing and Socratic garments, which imagine Duncan as an Elgin marble in motion – all that Fokine had borrowed for his ballets on Greek and Egyptian themes while pretending he had barely heard of her.
Khitrova makes clear that Russian ballet’s efforts to resemble a language were the salvation but also the scourge of the art, since too often the preoccupation with describing dance obscures its beauty. Duncan’s devotees, who built a cult around her, believed that she could access istina, or spiritual truth, while the rest of us are stuck with pravda: a socially and politically manipulated truth.
Instead of the infinite expansion of cerebral, rational processes, the insensate boundlessness of the pursuit of abstraction, Duncan sought to restore a natural order. She believed in it, as had the Pythagoreans, and it felt good to stand in the sun.

Notes

A six-page review essay by Simon Morrison covering three books: Daria Khitrova, Impossible Project: The story of Russian ballet and its survival; Elena Yushkova, A Revolutionary Dancer in Revolutionary Russia: Isadora Duncan in Russian and Soviet culture; and Irina Sirotkina, Dancing Freedom: Modern dance in late Imperial Russia and the early Soviet Union. On its surface it is about Russian ballet and Isadora Duncan. Structurally it stages a contest between two cosmologies: the imperial-hierarchical (ballet) and the solar-communal (free dance).
Opens with Noverre's promised "harmony of gesture, thought and 'the movements of the soul'" (p. 1) and closes with "it felt good to stand in the sun" (p. 6). → The arc runs from the soul's motions made visible (incarnation) to the body standing in the source of light (illumination). The essay walks out of the imperial theater into daylight.
"The movements of the soul" (les mouvements de l'âme) is a technical phrase of seventeenth-century French psychology — Descartes's Passions de l'âme, Le Brun's lectures on expression (outside text). The passions are literally motions of the soul, and the ballet d'action was the art of making them legible. → Dance as the soul's kinetics; the body as its readable surface.
Three witnesses to the lost history: "practitioners, ballet haters and balletomanes" (p. 1). → Makers, judges, lovers — a poietic/critical/erotic tripartition. It recurs in the essay's three authors, all women, dividing past (Khitrova: the imperial art), life (Yushkova) and afterlife (Sirotkina) among them — a Fates-like division, noted playfully.
The explicit solar moment: Duncan asks "Why not begin movement from the solar plexus, angling the body towards the sun?" (p. 3). → Two suns in one sentence: the sun within (the plexus is solar because its nerves radiate like rays) and the sun without; the body becomes a heliotrope. Proclus, On the Hieratic Art: the heliotrope turns with the sun and, could we hear it, its motion would be "a hymn to its king" (outside text). Duncan angling toward the sun is that plant-prayer performed by a human body.
Duncan's own account (My Life, 1927; The Art of the Dance, 1928 — outside text): she stood for hours with her hands folded over the solar plexus until she "discovered the central spring of all movement, the crater of motor power, the unity from which all diversities of movement are born." Ballet, she said, located the spring "at the base of the spine," from which arms, legs and trunk move "like an articulated puppet, producing an artificial mechanical movement not worthy of the soul"; she sought instead a spiritual source that would fill the body "with a vibrating light — the centrifugal force reflecting the spirit's vision." → Emanation doctrine in the flesh: movement radiating from one luminous center (Plotinus's sun-and-light image for the procession from the One, Enn. V.1.6). Ballet's puppet-from-the-spine is motion imposed from above by strings (hierarchy); Duncan's is motion welling from a center (the heliocentric body). Kleist's Marionette Theatre lurks here too: grace belongs to the puppet or to the god, never to the self-conscious creature in between (outside text).
"Duncan sought to restore a natural order. She believed in it, as had the Pythagoreans, and it felt good to stand in the sun" (p. 6). → The Republic's analogy compressed to a sentence: the sun is the offspring of the Good in the visible realm (VI 508b–509b), and here the Good is felt, through the skin. The Pythagoreans are the right name: Philolaus's central fire, Pythagoras as Hyperborean Apollo, Copernicus's appeal to the Pythagoreans when he enthroned the sun (outside text). A body that moves from its own sun and turns toward the sun is a heliocentric cosmology in miniature.
Solar ethics of freedom (the title is "Freedom in dance"). → Diogenes to Alexander: "stand out of my sun" — the sun is the one good hierarchy can block but never confer; it "rises on the evil and on the good" alike (Matt 5:45). The imperial theater is a night-world of chandeliers and footlights; Duncan's dance is diurnal and open-air, modelled on Greek theatre (p. 3). Even her Moscow school is lit by "the diffuse light emanating from the 'chandelier covered with a pink scarf'" (p. 4) — an artificial sun veiled to rose; "emanating" is the reviewer's word.
Socrates at Potidaea stands all night in thought and at dawn offers a prayer to the sun (Symposium 220d — outside text). → "Stand in the sun" is also the philosopher's posture after a long night of abstraction.
The rose-veiled chandelier and the killing scarf are the same object (§6): the veil that softens the sun for children is the veil that ends her.
The explicit passage: Fokine "challenged the hierarchy that placed the virtuosic prima ballerina and her partner at the top, with the corps de ballet at the bottom and coryphées serving as minor characters" (p. 2). → The company as a celestial hierarchy: a luminous center (prima), a dyad (her partner), an intermediate order (coryphées), and the corps — literally "the body" — at the bottom. Laid over a Platonic ladder of Forms → rulers → daimones → embodied humans, the coryphées fall in the daimonic, intermediary rank and the corps is the embodied many. Dionysius's nine angelic orders circle God in a perpetual chorus (outside text): the corps de ballet is a choir arranged by proximity to the source.
Etymology as inversion: coryphée < Greek koryphaios, the chorus-leader, from koryphē, "summit." Plotinus uses exactly this figure — souls are a chorus around the One as koryphaios; facing him they sing in tune, turned away they sing badly (Enn. VI.9.8 — outside text). → In imperial ballet the "summit" title names a minor rank, and Boborykin's coryphée is "reduced to performing in the rear row," "second from the water" (p. 2). The chorus has turned its back on its leader and the leader has sunk to the back row: an image of fallen hierarchy.
The court as source of the hierarchy: "Catherine the Great established ballet in Russia, and her Romanov successors lavished huge funds on it in St Petersburg. (Moscow's ballet finances were precarious by comparison.)" (p. 1). → Ballet's founding patron-cosmology is solar kingship — Louis XIV danced the rising Sun in the Ballet de la Nuit of 1653 (outside text). The prima ballerina inherits the Sun King's place; Duncan's sun replaces the sovereign with the star itself. Petersburg (planned, rational, the "window on Europe") against Moscow (the reviewer's own "kingdom of a village", p. 6) is the abstraction/natural-order polarity written on the map.
Fokine's remedy: "using all parts of the body to tell stories" (p. 2). → Against a hierarchy in which the feet speak and the rest decorates — every member has logos; the head cannot say to the feet, "I have no need of you" (1 Cor 12:21). Duncan goes further and relocates sovereignty to the middle of the body: neither head (reason) nor feet (pointe, "the water") but the solar center. Government by the hearth rather than by the capital.
"Though he scripted his dances, he wanted them to look as if they had been conceived on the spot, unpremeditated" (p. 2). → Hidden script beneath apparent spontaneity — Providence wearing the mask of chance; sprezzatura; the esoteric order under the exoteric improvisation.
"The greater lesson for contemporaries was that life should be an improvisation, just like the unscripted moments of the movement itself" (p. 2), set against the plots' "stark moral teachings." → Literal and moral senses vs. the anagogic sense: the exoteric plot instructs, the esoteric lesson is a mode of being. Spontaneity as freedom — "where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty" (2 Cor 3:17).
Duncan's "communal dance" and the Soviets' "communal existence" (p. 4). → The circle has no top. Free dance dissolves rank into the round: the Slavic khorovod, often read as a solar rite; the round dance of Christ and the disciples in the Acts of John — "whoso danceth not, knoweth not what cometh to pass" (outside text). The Soviet collective is the counterfeit of this: hierarchy abolished in name and reinstated as Stalin, whom Soviet panegyric often styled "the sun" — a false sun (outside text). "Duncanism didn't stand a chance under Stalin" (p. 5).

Source

Author: Simon Morrison
Publication: The Times Literary Supplement
Date: September 4, 2026
URL: https://www.the-tls.com/arts/dance/impossible-project-daria-khitrova-a-revolutionary-dancer-in-revolutionary-russia-elena-yushkova
Reviewed work: Daria Khitrova, Impossible Project: The story of Russian ballet and its survival; Elena Yushkova, A Revolutionary Dancer in Revolutionary Russia: Isadora Duncan in Russian and Soviet culture; Irina Sirotkina, Dancing Freedom: Modern dance in late Imperial Russia and the early Soviet Union