Embodied Practices as Sites of Interpretation and Recreation

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The papers in this panel address, in different ways, these issues of mediation and adaptation as they unfold in various cultural processes in the Soviet and post-Soviet context. The principal focus centers around embodied practice, by which we include forms of culture performed by the body: dance, theater, sailing. In their own ways, the papers trace how different ideological lines are disseminated and mediated between the state and individuals, central cultural institutions and peripheral ones, emphasizing Soviet forms of cultural consumption and individual interpretation. This becomes especially relevant for projects that could be grouped in under the "cosmopolitan" Soviet and post-Soviet paradigms. From jazz and Dadaism to Shakespearean theater to Western popular music and dance, and beyond, Western cultural forms traversed different institutions and ideological formulations before becoming embodied in the Soviet actor, dancer, musician, sailor: to be sure, however, while this embodiment is shaped by ideological pressure, it also becomes a site for potential play and reinterpretation. Embodiment is a means of actualizing Soviet and post-Soviet cultural visions across spatial and temporal lines: whether this be the idea of the Renaissance or a contemporaneous Western form or historical sailing, embodiment affords a means of at once enacting an idea in Soviet and post-Soviet modernity and allowing it to be re-created within a new context and time.

Sub Unit

• Arts II: Music, Theater, Performance Studies

Chair

• Margarita Kuleva, New York U

Papers

• The Authentic Shakespeare and the Stalinist Cosmopolitan Vision - Ilya Nemirovsky, Harvard U

• Valentin Parnakh and the Dadaist Search for a 'Universal Language' - Lana Belenkaia, New York U

• Identity Transformation in Recreational Practices under the Late Socialism - Ekaterina K

• Kokora: Building Inheritance Through Building a Boat - Nikita Karbasov, Columbia U

Discussant

• Tatiana Efremova, George Washington U