As a result, I haven't spent this evening doing what I wanted to do for this newsletter, which was to talk about Elfreda Chatman's theories of information behavior that I'm observing play out across the US right now. Instead, because SNOW!, I put the Nutcracker on Youtube and accidentally landed myself on the Kirov version at the Mariinsky Theater, and even on my phone, found myself sucked in to the dynamic and precise dancing, the perfection of the colors... the size of that stage! It's ginormous! And all of this got me actually thinking more about the history of ballet, and the context of ballet in Russia and it's evolutions in this week's newsletter.
You are unique, and if that is not fulfilled, then something has been lost. -- Martha Graham
Since I don't have to worry about driving in it, I can get excited about it! We live at the top of two hills. One is about a half mile down, and the other is about a third of a mile down to the same elevation, both mean that there's a real possibility of car sledding which is not fun.
As a result, I haven't spent this evening doing what I wanted to do for this newsletter, which was to talk about Elfreda Chatman's theories of information behavior that I'm observing play out across the US right now. In brief, Chatman's theories are basically studies of dysfunctional information seeking behaviors. There's the Small World theory, information poverty, life in the round, and normative behavior. I want to come back to this topic in a future newsletter because exploring the life in the round theory and small world theory in particular explains so much of what I think we're seeing with the rejection of facts by a very vocal group of people. I want to re-read the theories in particular to see if there was a recommendation for overcoming these behaviors.
Instead, because SNOW!, I put the Nutcracker on Youtube and accidentally landed myself on the Kirov version at the Mariinsky Theater, and even on my phone, found myself sucked in to the dynamic and precise dancing, the perfection of the colors... the size of that stage! It's ginormous! And all of this got me actually thinking more about the history of ballet, and the context of ballet in Russia and it's evolutions.
Peter the Great really wanted to modernize Russia, bring it into the Age of Enlightenment from a feudal state. He (and no doubt a fair sized court) traveled all over Europe and learned things to bring back, technical and cultural. One of these things was ballet. I think most people think of Russia as a sort of extension of Europe, and it really is not. The Tzars were autocratic rulers. There was no Magna Carta type document outlining the rights of citizens. There were no rights for citizens. Any rights the landowners had were exclusively at the will of the state, which is to say the Tzar.
Russia even then was a shockingly large country. With Eastern Europe to the west, Kazakistan and Mongolia to the south (and for reference, Mongolia is north of China), and bordered on the east by the Pacific. I'm still boggled by its size and I knew that it reached to the Pacific, but to be north of China, and not just China but Mongolia, "the far East". Well. Big. It's just really really big. When one thinks about the disparity of identifiable cultures and languages in Europe (and, well, really any part of the world), how many did Russia have that are basically invisible to us because it's all encompassed by "RUSSIA" (or when I was younger, "The Soviet Union"). That Russia could stretch that far, even then, is nearly inconceivable & fascinating to me.
So Peter the Great brought ballet back from Europe, along with ship building and various other new learnings. One of the criticisms one will hear sooner or later about the stories in ballets is that they're fetishization of indigenous and/or cultures perceived to be 'exotic'. I think this is mostly wrong, outside of where one would see the "Spanish dancers/Mazurka" represented as part of the court scenes in the ballets. Only maybe the Chinese. Peter would have been using the European stylistic dances to show that they too were a country "of the world", the rest of the dances would be from countries that were distant enough from St. Petersburg that the nearest border might very well encompass Russians that had much more in common with the bordering countries than central Russia. Peter wanted to recognize and celebrate the breadth of the country. Sort of a pride in 'these are the extent of my lands'.
More recently, i.e., the beginning of the 1900s, with Ballets Russes (who, while comprised of Russian trained dancers primarily, never performed in Russia due to The Revolution), the 'primitivism' exhibited in pieces such as Rites of Spring, was not based on their exotification of the Native American indigenous stereotypes, but on solid classic Russian/Siberian shaman & folk traditions (hence the subtitle, "Pictures of Pagan Russia in Two Parts"). Claims of appropriation ring hollow when it is truly their own culture/s they're reflecting.
Funny things the Nutcracker makes me think about.
In other snow news, hot chocolate with a bunch of eggnog & a healthy splash of bourbon is really quite amazing. Much better than the too sweet but still tasty marshmallow.
I expect the snow to be gone by the time this arrives with you all, it was fun what little of it we got to see.
With love and curiosity, even when it takes me down a totally different tangent than I was aiming for,
--Susan