Freedom in Dance
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.