Dance practices, an easily overlooked area in social and historical studies, can become a discreet but influential tool of politics. State control, regulations and power structures manifest themselves in dance through choreography and music choices, dress norms, the range of ‘appropriate’ movements and body distancing. Equally, the Cold War cultural competition between the USSR and the West instrumentalized dance as an ideological medium, both on the level of leisure activity and that of an art form.
In the colloquium, Maria Kardash introduced her research project on the USSR dance and body politics that she began during her stay at the Open Society Archives in Budapest in 2022 and which she has further developed during her IWM fellowship. This study is based on the media representation of Soviet dance companies' touring activities (such as of the Moiseyev Ensemble) and on the discourses surrounding their performances in Western publications of the Cold War era. Approaching the stage portrayal of Soviet Subalterns as a practice of Othering, Kardash built her talk around the hierarchies of the USSR reflected in the choreographies of state-supported folk and popular dance ensembles, as well as on the Western gaze decoding these implicit hierarchies. She also discussed the present-day discourse around the Soviet legacy in Ukrainian folk-stage dances.
Maria Kardash is a Ukrainian dance anthropologist and performer working with the topics of cultural representation, the construction of Other in public narratives and notions of “oriental” and “exotic” in art.
Mariia Shynkarenko, Research Associate: Ukraine in European Dialogue, moderated the colloquium.
