AThe latest show by my Sherman-Palladino is a parody of ballet dancers. On the privileged video of April 24, the series of eight episodes concerns a stunting of public relations elaborately choreographed in which rival ballet companies in New York and Paris exchange their main dancers in the hope of bringing more young people to go to ballet. In the show, the artistic director of Paris, Geneviève Lavigne (Charlotte Gainsbourg), orchestrates the blow after many dancers left for Covid-19, and because of what she calls the “dead and dying” public for the ballet and its financing flows. Around the world, the NYC Ballet Company Metropolitan Ballet Theater – a riff on the American Ballet Theater, which occurs at the famous New York Arts Center, Lincoln Center – is faced with its own problems. New York campus scenes appear throughout the series.
While Star is not officially based on a true story, there was in fact an exchange of ballet dancers between the rival societies of the United States and the Soviet ballet in the late 1950s and in the early 1960s. Here is what we know about the exchange and the way it differs from events Star.
Lace down during the Cold War
At the height of the Cold War, the United States sent ballet dancers to tour in the Soviet Union, and the Soviets have sent ballet dancers to perform in the United States
“People on each side thought it would lead to more peaceful relationships,” explains Anne Searcy, author of Ballet in the Cold War: a Soviet-American exchange and associate professor of musical history at the University of Washington.
Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was more open to the maintenance of peaceful relations with capitalist countries than his predecessor Joseph Staline. The Soviet Union used ballet, which has a rich cultural history in Russia, as a tool for diplomacy to promote a positive vision of the communist lifestyle. “The United States wanted to correspond to this,” as Searcy says.
Not all Soviet dancers have gone to the United States; The managers took 110 out of the 250. Fifty -three members of the American Ballet Theater went to the Soviet Union, including the ballerina Maria Tallchief, who said that she had cold feet – literally, she said that she was so cold on stage that she could not feel her feet.
Among the pieces of which the Americans reoted, there were duos Cygne lake And Don Quixote, George Balanochine Theme and variationsAnd Jerome Robbins’ Fantasy for free. Khrushchev himself appeared in the last performance of Moscow and invited Tallchief and other ballerinas to a midnight supper. The Soviets also played Cygne lake in the United States, as well as Giselle, Romeo and Juliet And Stone flower.
The exchange obtains a standing ovation
Overall, the public thought that the exchange was on a point.
“The Bolchoi ballet was received in 1959 with curiosity and large gusts of camaraderie in the Cold War,” said Time.
Scalpers sold tickets to see the Bolchoi ballet at the Metropolitan Opera for $ 150 each – which would cost about $ 1,568 today – and people even posted in virgin checks, asking ticket sellers to fill in the desired amount. The magazine described the Dash Mad as a “fiercest ticket in recent memory”. Telephone operators leave due to the stress of the management of telephone lines, and someone who worked for the box office was assailed in a public library when she mentioned what she did in life.
An exchange of 1962 occurred during the Cuban missile crisis, and despite the threat of nuclear war rupture, the public in the two countries has always applauded artists. As time reported at the time, “Russian music would no longer be the same.
However, there was a performance that was not well received: the adaptation of the Soviets of Spartacus. The public hooked this one. As time described the scene inside the Metropolitan Opera:
“During the intermission at the Metropolitan Opera last week, a man who needed a bitterness a lot approached an attendant at an exit.” When “, he asked,” will the next orgy begin? He barely had time to wait for an answer.
There was neither winner nor loser in this ballet exchange. It did not end the Cold War – the Cold War itself did not end until 1989, but it helped the Americans and the Soviets to see themselves in a better day. As Searcy explains its effect: “The Americans could see real Soviets instead of reading these other frightening people who are different from them, and they can see them create art, which has had a big impact in [terms of] Believing that the Soviets were humans like them. Vice-versa, Soviet viewers were impressed by American artists and that made them more sympathetic, to some extent, in the United States in general. But I don’t think there is a clear feeling that one did better than the other. »»
How to exchange in Star Usrier the state of the ballet
While the Ballet exchange of the Cold War was supported by the United States and the Soviet governments, the exchange ballet Star is a blow sponsored by a donor in the midst of a public relations crisis, because his business is faced with a oil spill. This is laughing at tensions between artistic directors and people who write checks.
Like Tallchief, representatives of the American Dance Company Star Discover a culture shock that moves to Paris. A famous choreographer Tobias Bell (Gideon Glick) stands out when he cannot reproduce his toiletries.
For the other dancers, the exchange turns out to be changing life in the right direction. A Parisian dancer of the American company Mishi (Taïs Vinolo) realizes that she feels more comfortable in New York than her hometown because of the French girls clicking with whom she grew up and her parents of couple who essentially ignore her. And not only does the ballerina paima ballerina cheyenne toussaint (lou de laâge) featured The Nutcracker, But she also takes a young girl under her wing, the daughter of a cleaning lady who practiced in the rehearsal studios after the opening hours. She fights so that the girl is registered at the ballet school on the campus, then crushes the sessions, giving her hard comments on each position.
While the exchange of ballet was an instant success during the Cold War, in StarIt is not clear if the exchange arouses enough attention for most of the series. At the end, it is definitely considered a success, but completely by accident. Now it remains to be seen if an Amazon program on the ballet will attract more people to the real ballet.
