Singh, Lee

Generations of feminist critics and scholars have dismissed ballet as oppressive to women and the dance form most responsible for reifying patriarchal culture. Studies of ballet choreography, in particular, have been constructed according to the myth of the lone male genius. However, stenographic records from ballet production processes in the Soviet Union reveal that female ballet dancers actively debated with their male colleagues. Even though men were much more often credited as choreographers on theatrical posters and programs, archival sources generated by Soviet artistic institutions show that Soviet ballet choreography was a form of social creativity in which women regularly participated.

Drawing upon sources from the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art and the A.A. Bakhrushin Central State Theatrical Museum in Moscow, my paper recovers some of these women's voices. I focus on two examples of Soviet ballerinas who participated in debates and meetings held between 1930 and 1955. Irina Charnotskaia expressed strong opinions about appropriate embodied forms and ideological content for Soviet ballet in the 1930s. Ol'ga Lepeshinskaia made key interventions in discussions about how to restage The Red Poppy at the Bolshoi Theater in the late 1940s through the mid-1950s. I argue that these examples challenge existing understandings of ballet choreography as a solo male endeavor. Recognizing the history of ballet choreography as a collaborative process—and one in which women took part—will help scholars reconceptualize ballet as less inherently patriarchal and provide precedent for women choreographers and collaborative choreographic projects in twenty-first-century professional artistic practice.

Lee Gurdial Kaur Singh earned an AB in Dance, cum laude, from Mount Holyoke College and is currently a PhD candidate in Modern Russian History at the University of California, Riverside (USA). Her dissertation research illuminates how Soviet artists and officials transformed ballet from an elite genre to a form of socialist popular culture intended for the enjoyment and edification of mass audiences. This research challenges prevailing scholarly assumptions about dancers as passive vessels for the creativity of individual genius male choreographers. In addition to highlighting ballet choreography as a collaborative process, Singh brings to light historical precedents for women's agency in ballet. Her research has been funded in part by a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Education and a Dissertation Research Grant from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. She has presented her research at conferences in the United States and Canada.

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