Pictures of Pagan Russia in the 1880s

How did Russian stage designers imagine the pagan Rus, the origin of the Russian empire, in the 1880s and how did dancing and ballet figure in imagining this community? Did the ancient people of Rus dance and did the dance ballet? The 1880s and 1890s saw a rapid shift in how the origin story of Russia was being told and staged. Ideals of national romantic "historical accuracy" in scenography forged close ties between the performing arts, the kustar crafts revival movement, and Russian populism (narodnichestvo), evident in the work of figures like Viktor Vasnestov. The consequent re-choreographing of staged bodies later resulted int he emergence of what became known as 'the new ballet'. Yet, scholarship has effectively separated ballet from opera as an art form, in part because of Wagnerian ideals in opera where ballet was denigrated as a useless divertissement and break in the aesthetic of the total work of art. What, then, can be deducted about the relationship of costume and ballet, dancing, and choreography in the absence of actual costumes that have not been preserved from this period and against the narrative that focuses on bodies singing rather than bodies dancing the imagined past? 

Hanna Järvinen works at the doctoral programme of the Theatre Academy of UNIARTS Helsinki, Finland. She is also Honorary Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Dance History at the University of Turku. The author of Dancing Genius (Palgrave Macmillan 2014) and eight edited books as well as a number of articles and book chapters, her research combines dance scholarship with performance studies, history, cultural studies, and artistic research. In particular, she has been interested in authorship and canonization, postcolonialism and decolonization, and questions of materiality and contemporaneity in art practice. She enjoys making performances and collaborating with artists and her recent research projects include the Swedish Research Council workshop project Spectral Collaborations (2019-2020) and the Academy of Finland project How to Do Things with Performance (2016-2021).