Staging the Folk

Choreographic Issues of National Representation

Bibliographic Data

ID20458079
AuthorsAnthony Shay (Pomona College, California, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume39
Issue2
Pages222-246
Publication date2021-11-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueDance Research (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0264-2875 • E-ISSN: 1750-0095
PublisherEdinburgh University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.3366/drs.2021.0344
OpenAlexW3211220796
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited22

This article looks at the multiple ways that folk dance has been staged in both the nineteenth century when character or national (the two terms were used interchangeably) dance was widely used in classical ballet, and the twentieth in which Igor Moiseyev created a new genre of dance related to it. The ballet masters that created character dance for ballet often created ballroom dances based on folk origin, but that would be suitable for the urban population. This popularity of national dance was the result of the burgeoning of romantic nationalism that swept Europe after the French Revolution. Beginning in the 1930s with Igor Moiseyev founding the first professional ‘folk dance’ company for the Soviet Union, nation states across the world established large, state-supported folk dance companies for purposes of national and ethnic representation that dominated the stages of the world for the second half of the twentieth century. These staged versions of folk dance, were, I argue an extension of nineteenth century national/character dance because their founding directors, like Igor Moiseyev, came from the era when ballet dancers were trained in that genre

Art · Art history · Ballet · Contemporary dance · Dance · Folk dance · Literature · Modern dance · Nationalism · Political science · Popularity · Visual arts · Diversity and Impact of Dance · History · Law · Musicology and Musical Analysis

Tools

Open DOI