NOTE DATE AND TIME CHANGE. Event will take place Wednesday, March 28 12:00PM.
Please join us for a talk with Nicoletta Misler, retired Professor of Russian and East European Art at the Università di Napoli "L'Orientale," about her book The Russian Art of Movement, 1920-1930. Lynn Garafola, Professor Emerita of Dance, Barnard College, will moderate.
Supporting a declaration fundamental to Russian body culture of the 1920s—“In the Beginning Was the Body”—The Russian Art of Movement, 1920-1930 highlights the development of modern dance, the language of movement and its representation during Russia’s revolutionary decade of 1920-1930.
Under this theoretical and practical premise, The Russian Art of Movement revisits what was called the “Art of Movement” investigated by an innovative group of scholars, dancers and choreographers from the Choreological Laboratory at the Russian Academy of Artistic Sciences in Moscow. Established by Vasilii Kandinsky and other researchers such as Aleksandr Larionov and Aleksei Sidorov in 1921, the Laboratory was a unique institution in the history of New Dance in Europe and one of many utopian projects within late Imperial Russian and early Soviet culture. But unlike other experiments during those turbulent years, as an active enterprise, the Laboratory lasted a relatively long time (from 1923 until 1929), sponsoring conferences, publications and four major exhibitions under the rubric “The Art of Movement”. The Laboratory studied how movement could be recorded in its various kinetic extensions—gesture, mime, dance, gymnastics, emotional expression—and, to this end, made recourse to various instruments and methodologies, including graphic registration along the lines of musical, pictorial and sculptural transcription as well as mechanical registration (still photography, cinematography, cyclograms).
The Russian Art of Movement treats of the diverse manifestations of this multi-facetted subject—from plastic dance to rhythmic gymnastics (from Nina Aleksandrova to Liudmila Alekseeva), from time and motion studies (Nikolai Bernshtein’s experiments in biomechanics) to provocative performances in the nude (Kas’ian Goleizovsky, Lev Lukin, Aleksandr Rumnev) and from acrobatics and gymnastics (Valeriia Tsvetaeva) to variety theatre and folk dance (Nikolai Foregger, Vera Shabshai). Copious references are also made to the American and European apogees of the New Dance such as Isadora Duncan and Rudolf von Laban and to their interaction with Russia’s own new and radical Art of Movement. Based on extensive research in public and private archives, The Russian Art of Movement brings the conceptual ideas and champions of the dynamic into strong relief, describing the theory and practice of its champions and reproducing unique works of art and vintage photographs, most of which are being seen for the first time in the West: in this way, the book restores an entire chapter to the history of Russian and Soviet culture, one long forgotten after the political impositions and expurgations of the Stalin era.
Nicoletta Misler, Professor of Russian and East European Art at the Università di Napoli “L’Orientale,” Italy (now retired), is a specialist in the visual culture of Russian Modernism. Her academic interests range from the artists of the avant-garde such as Kazimir Malevich, Pavel Filonov and Vasilii Kandinsky to the philosophers of the time, especially Pavel Florensky (her book on his spatial concepts appeared as Beyond Vision. Essays on the Perception of Art from Reaktion Books, London, in 2002), and the architects of the avant-garde such as Yakov Chernikhov and Ivan Leonidov. Among her studies of modern Russian art are monographs on Filonov, Francisco Infante, Solomon Nikritin, Aleksandr Ponomarev.
This event is co sponsored by the Barnard College Department of Dance and the Harriman Institute.
