Picture and Image of Dance (Episodes from the Creative Experience of Russian Ballet Masters of the Late 19th - Early 20th Century)

The article concerns an unusual and almost unexplored aspect of work of choreography masters of the Silver Age of Russian culture. This aspect is their work in the field of pictorial representation of the dance. The main purpose of the article is to study different facets of the ballet dancers and choreographers’ pictorial works, their experiments in different kinds of plastic arts and styles in the context of the era which they lived and created in. The author draws special attention to the pictorial material’s detailed internal transformations - when the stage images born in a sheet of paper or in a sculptural volume begin to perform a variety of emotional and semantic functions justified by the expressive language of plastic arts. Analyzing different materials (old publications, archival collections, museum and private collections), the author manages to find and bring together the rare information on artistic heritage of such ballet masters as: A.M. Pavlova, V.F. Nizhinsky, the brothers N.G. and S.G. Legat, P.I. Goncharov, M.M. Fokin and B.F. Nizhinskaya. The analysis of pictorial, graphic and sculptural works of the masters allows us to reach the level of stylistically-plastic synthesis, which is a significant step in the theoretical study and understanding of their artistic heritage.

ballet dancers, choreographers, pictorial art, dance image, artistic comprehension, visual realization

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