02/29/2008
Please join us for a talk by Elizabeth Kendall ()
February 29, 5 p.m.
1 Emily Dickinson Hall
This will be a talk about a book-in-progress, with the working title The Lost Muse: George Balanchine, Lidiia Ivanova and the Russian Revolution. Balanchine and Ivanova were classmates, friends, artistic collaborators at St. Petersburg’s imperial ballet academy. Their training was bisected by the Russian revolution; their coming of age occurred in the arts-making crucible of their dying city. By 1924, the twenty-year-old Ivanova had become an adored young ballerina, a symbol of her city’s will to recovery after near-devastation. In June of that year, she drowned, or was murdered, in a boating accident. Two weeks later, Balanchine, already an aspiring choreographer, left for the West with a band of young dancers, that would have included her, had she lived.
How does one reconstruct their stories, almost a century later? What do the stories say about fate of this mythical city, and the art it gave the modern world?
