Like a Bomb Going Off: Leonid Yakobson and Ballet as Resistance in Soviet Russia

by Janice Ross, Lynn Garafola (Foreword)

The powerfully moving story of the Russian Jewish choreographer who used dance to challenge despotism

Everyone has heard of George Balanchine, but few outside Russia know of Leonid Yakobson, Balanchine’s contemporary and arguably his equal, who remained in Lenin’s Russia and survived censorship during the darkest days of Stalin. Like Shostakovich, Yakobson suffered for his art and yet managed to create a singular body of revolutionary work that spoke to the Soviet condition. His ballets were considered so explosive that their impact was described as “like a bomb going off.”
 
Challenged rather than intimidated by the restrictions imposed by Soviet censors on his ballets, Yakobson offered dancers and audiences an experience quite different from the prevailing Soviet aesthetic. He was unwilling to bow completely to the state’s limitations on his artistic opportunities, so despite his fraught relations with his political overseers, his ballets retained early-twentieth-century movement innovations such as turned-in and parallel-foot positions, oddly angled lifts, and eroticized content, all of which were anathema to prevailing Soviet ballet orthodoxy. For Yakobson, ballet was a form of political discourse, and he was particularly alive to the suppressed identity of Soviet Jews and officially sanctioned anti-Semitism. He used dance to celebrate reinvention and self-authorship—the freedom of the individual voice as subject and medium. His ballets challenged the role of the dancing body during some of the most repressive decades of totalitarian rule.
 
Yakobson’s work unfolded in a totalitarian state, and there was little official effort to preserve his choreographic archive or export knowledge of him to the West—gaps that dance historian Janice Ross seeks to redress in this book. Based on untapped archival collections of photographs, films, and writings about Yakobson’s work in Moscow and St. Petersburg for the Bolshoi and Kirov ballets, as well as interviews with former dancers, family, and audience members, this illuminating and beautifully written study brings to life a hidden history of artistic resistance in the Soviet Union through the story of a brave artist who struggled his entire life against political repression yet continued to offer a vista of hope.

Genres: Biography, History, Russia, Nonfiction

537 pages, Hardcover

First published January 13, 2015

Reviews

[Apollinaire]

Not a review exactly, but an essay I wrote for the Atlantic that takes Ross's important book as its jumping off point.

Here is the link. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/a...

And the essay's first three paragraphs:

To create modern art in a classical mode is to face forward and backward at once, yoked to the past while inching toward the future. Only a fool or a genius would attempt it. So I had heard of the Soviet ballet choreographer Leonid Yakobson, whose modernist advances took place on hostile home territory. I had seen "Vestris," the solo he created for a young Mikhail Baryshnikov that compressed an early ballet master’s mercurial life into a few minutes; it was the only contemporary work the superstar brought with him when he defected in 1974. I knew that the best dancers in Leningrad and Moscow had deemed the choreographer a God-given genius and a rebel to boot.

But whom did these artists, trapped behind the Iron Curtain, have to compare him with? Their praise could easily be dismissed as nationalist hype. After all, the standard American view is that the Soviet vanguard of ballet barely outlived Lenin. The ferment was in Paris, where the young Russian émigré George Balanchine collaborated with Stravinsky on the groundbreaking Apollo for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Then the action traveled west, with Balanchine. Thanks to him and his New York City Ballet, angular, plotless, modernist works replaced silly story ballets as the art form’s pride. Without Balanchine, the thinking goes, ballet would have buried itself in the past—and indeed, since the master’s death, in 1983, it has struggled to chart a future.

In "Like a Bomb Going Off: Leonid Yakobson and Ballet as Resistance in Soviet Russia," Janice Ross soundly rejects this self-congratulatory and ultimately self-defeating account. A dance scholar at Stanford, she delivers on her claim that “during the initial years of the Cold War, the West did not have an exclusive purchase on experimentation in dance.” The book’s timing could not be better: for the past decade or so, the Russians have been rehabilitating works from the Stalinist era that brilliantly debunk the notion that Soviet ballet slept out the 20th century. And Yakobson is the ideal figure on whom to focus a corrected and expanded ballet history. Other choreographers also experimented fruitfully and were periodically squashed by the state, and their work might have been even better. But the Leningrad Jew who was raised with the revolution, and who died before its whole edifice collapsed, is the peerless Balanchine’s perfect complement—the yin to his yang. Enlarging the parameters of ballet that Balanchine laid out, Yakobson’s example justifies the ecumenical spirit spurring on the art form today.......

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/a...

[Aurelie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This turned out to be a great book. It took me a while to get into it - the writing is a bit academic, and while the subject is fascinating, the book isn't a page-turner. In fact I gave up on it when I first got it, until I picked it up again recently to read the chapter about the ballet Spartacus. That's when the greatness of Leonid Yakobson - unjustly forgotten Soviet choreographer as ground-breaking as Balanchine - overshadowed the (minor) flaws of the writing, at least for me. After reading the Spartacus chapter I easily read the book to the end, and then I backtracked to read the first few chapters.

I happen to have an old DVD of Baryshnikov at Wolf Trap where he dances Yakobson's Vestris, among other things, and it does seem very avant-garde in the emphasis on gestures and face expressions, even for now. I enjoyed learning more about the man who dared create such pieces for Soviet dancers, and has had so much of his choreography lost and forgotten. I found it particularly interesting that he deliberately stayed away from the moves expected by the audience and tried to make the dancers dance in ways that went against their training. Sadly, I'm not sure his Spartacus is often shown today. It seems that Yury Grigorovich's Spartacus, more people-pleasing, is shown instead.

I feel grateful that Janice Ross has given us this biography of Yakobson and tried to save him from oblivion.

[Amber · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an extensive history of dance in the USSR. I had not known of Leonid Yakobson till I came across this book. Janice Ross was thorough in her research. Most of Yakobson's choreography was never recorded and this is a tremendous loss to Soviet dance and Russian Ballet, but Ross describes the dances in detail as she stitches stories collected from those who knew and danced with/for Yakobson.
I'm in awe of how relentless Yakobson was, how despite every obstacle he encountered, he continued to make work and continued constructing his visionary ballets even if it was only in his head till he could gather the dancers and space to unveil his choreography on.
This book is not difficult to read however it is very detailed and long. The highlights for me were in reading about the relationship between Yakobson and Balanchine- I was so grieved for Yakobson here-, and the aesthetics and semiotics of Soviet theatre and how Soviet myth took shape through legendary stories such as Spartacus.

[Mandy · Rating 3 out of 5]

The subject of this flawed but mostly engrossing book is the little known but important and innovative Soviet choreographer Leonid Yakobson. Little attention has been paid to his work in the West, and little has been seen (I don’t know about in Russia) and Ross does an excellent job in bringing him to the prominence he obviously deserves with this study of his life and work. Although a lay reader can get a lot out of it, it’s largely a book for the ballet enthusiast as Ross spends much of it describing Yakobson’s choreography and placing it within and without the classical and modern dance tradition. Ross’ focus is on the dance itself and the political and historical context that Yakobson worked in, and I found the book particularly illuminating in demonstrating how Soviet censorship of the arts worked and how challenging it was for Yakobson to work around it. However I got little sense of the man himself or his thoughts and feelings. The book is not a conventional biography and perhaps shouldn’t be criticised as though it were. But it left me feeling that although I had learnt much about Soviet ballet and about Yakobson as a choreographer I still knew little about him as an individual, and that disappointed me. There’s scope for someone else to write a definitive biography and I would read it with pleasure. This book I found an effort – a worthwhile one perhaps, but it could have been a much more readable and accessible account of a fascinating figure who deserves to be better known.

[Mills College Library]

792.80947 R8245 2015