How Shostakovichs The Bolt changed ballet history

Vividly energetic designs influenced by constructivism costume/design workshop for The Bolt, 1931.

. Photograph: Grad and St Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music

In Soviet Russia in 1930, the cultural energies of the revolution the jazz, the constructivist art, the Meyerhold experiments in theatre were still alive and bubbling. But Stalin was already turning revolution into a brutal state orthodoxy. With the launch of his 1928 five-year plan, and its attendant political persecutions, artists found themselves in serious danger if they were considered to have fallen foul of the official cultural line.

One early victim of these hardening times was The Bolt, a 1931 ballet with designs by Tatiana Bruni, music by Dmitri Shostakovich and choreography by Fedor Lopukhov. Its currently the subject of an exhibition at Londons Gallery of Russian Art and Design, which showcases a fabulously intact collection of Brunis costume designs and even a few of the actual costumes.

The designs have a vivid energy. Theres the clear influence of constructivism and Soviet poster art in their bright blocks of colour, their vibrant patterns and geometric lines, but also a dash of futurism and even a possible reference to Parade (the 1917 cubist ballet designed by Picasso) in the comically stereotyping costumes worn by dancers representing the American and Japanese navies.

That mix, however, was already too avant-garde for a state rapidly embracing the ersatz traditionalism of socialist realism, and the ballet as a whole was too playful. Despite its seemingly impeccable narrative of industrial espionage being routed by heroic factory workers, its creators were too tempted to have fun with their cast of baddies (the Lazy Idler, the Petty Bourgeois Woman, and the decadent, western types satirised by the local amateur theatre troupe). They were too obviously bored by the decent workers, the earnest members of the local Komsomol group the young communist league.

The Bolt was judged to have shown a dangerous levity in the handling of serious issues; Shostakovichs flippant score veered too close to western dance music, and the innovative wit of Lopukhovs choreography was condemned as grotesque. One critic complained about the dancification of industrial processes, while the chorus of Red Army cavalry, sitting astride a line of chairs, was considered an outrageous mockery.

The ballet was banned after just one performance, and Lopukhov was sacked from his position as artistic director of the Mariinsky or the Leningrad State Academic Ballet as it was then called. Yet, as precarious as this ballet had proved, in 1935 Lopukhov and Shostakovich attempted one more collaboration a comedy set on a collective farm. The Bright Stream was acclaimed at its early performances at the Maly theatre in Leningrad, but when it transferred to Moscow it came under the close scrutiny of Stalins cultural police. After Pravda denounced the work as ballet falsehood, the librettist Adrian Piotrovsky was sent to the gulag, and a fearful Shostakovich cancelled the premiere of his newly composed Symphony No 4.

Lopukhov, whod been in line for directorship of the Bolshoi, had to remove himself fast, and spent the next eight years as an itinerant ballet master, travelling as far away as Tashkent. Even though he was briefly back in charge of the Mariinsky (by now the Kirov Ballet) during the war years, and was kept on in the company as a teacher, his choreographic career was essentially over.

One of the great questioning talents of the Soviet ballet was thus more or less relegated to a footnote in history, and much of his choreography was lost including these two offending ballets, although theyve been recently and very successfully re-created by Alexei Ratmansky for the Bolshoi ballet.

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How Shostakovichs The Bolt changed ballet history