Like a Bomb Going Off by Janice Ross

Author:Janice Ross
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2015-04-22T04:00:00+00:00

Spartacus (1956), act 1: The Triumph of Rome, Askold Makarov (c.), Kirov Ballet, Leningrad. Photographer unknown.

On several levels Spartacus tries to pick up the threads of innovation from the decade of the 1920s, to remember a modernism suppressed by socialist realism and the drambalet. Specifically Yakobson also quotes from his own work in The Golden Age a quarter century earlier, pulling these artifacts of dance innovation into the 1950s Soviet experience. These included the use of the cinematic technique of slow motion, the expression of subjectivity through a personal dance language, and a dance vocabulary that stretches outside of classicism to embrace gymnastics and athletics. Cinematic effects include the grand opening of Spartacus, which is frozen in midaction by a blackout and followed immediately by a scene that opens on the tableaux of the captured slaves being handed off with a cash transfer to their owners. Repeatedly throughout the ballet Yakobson uses frieze action and tableaux vivants so that action quiets into stillness and then animates back into full movement. One of the most arresting uses of this device occurs in the battle scenes of the slave revolt, where the dancers assume the attenuated drama of the actual scenes from the Pergamon Altar, freezing as the curtain falls and then rearranging themselves in a newly advanced stage of the conflict, which we glimpse like a stop-action snapshot when the curtain rises again a moment later.

Some of the Soviet dance critics of the time who reviewed Spartacus were both pleased and puzzled by its innovations, particularly the manner in which Yakobson offered a modernist reworking of the classical vocabulary. Ballet historian and critic Vera Krasovskaya, who followed Yakobson’s work closely over many years, wrote at length about Spartacus, noting respectfully in a passage he quotes in his own Letters to Noverre that “the choreography of Spartacus is based on the devices just contrary to those of the classical style.”22 She continues, explaining that there is no pointe work in the entire ballet, something that had historically been attempted only in short ballets like Nijinsky’s Afternoon of a Faun (1912), never a full-length work.23 Yet she is displeased with the lack of “leaps, extended movements and particularly spins,” all of which, including the obligatory fouetté turns for the female dancer and multiple pirouettes for the male, Yakobson deliberately left out of his ballet. Yakobson “escapes the temptations of drama directing,” Krasovskaya observes, “usually regarding the libretto as the starting point for his composing some huge canvases which comment on the plot through different aspects of figurative plasticity. … Yakobson undoubtedly has music in his heart and soul. But he excels Fokine and Goleizovsky in regarding music as a servant to his imagination.”24 Yakobson quotes Krasovskaya’s comments about Spartacus at length in his Letters to Noverre monograph, puzzling with irritation how she could agree that a new vocabulary is needed and then fault him for not including the staple show-off steps of classical ballet. “It is evident that Spartacus, deprived of pointe work,

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