The history of ballet is full of forgotten performances and intriguing stories. Among the lost ballets there is for example The Bolt, premiered on 8th April 1931 at the Leningrad State Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet, and promptly pulled off the programme, banned by the Soviet authorities amongst suspicions that it was a satirical work.
Ballet and costume fans willing to rediscover it can do so at an exhibition opening to the public today at GRAD: Gallery for Russian Arts and Design in London.
Curated by GRAD's Elena Sudakova and Alexandra Chiriac and organised in collaboration with the St Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music, the exhibition features beautiful costume and set-design sketches plus period photographs.
Dmitri Shostakovich's second ballet was a blurry mix of Komsomol medleys, intoxicating waltzes, Red Army marches, circus acrobatics and vaudeville antics on traditional balletic structures.
The three long acts of the ballets were based on a true story and revolved around an anti-hero, a drunken lout identified as the Lazy Idler, who gets sacked from his factory job and seeks revenge by convincing his sidekick Goshka to hoist a huge bolt into one of the workshop lathes.
The plan works and the lathe is short circuited; Lazy blames a member of the team of shock workers, Boris, but then Goshka admits his guilt revealing the real culprit. Lazy is captured and the labourers go back to their repetitive work on the production line.
The story of the ballet looked at a topical subject - industrial sabotage and the first Five-Year Plan - but, according to the critics, it staged it in a superficial and irreverent way, with proletarians and bourgeois characters representing two opposite poles, positive and negative.
Shostakovich wrote the music of The Bolt while he was involved in multiple projects for stage and screen. Since he wasn't a ballet expert, he sought advice from his collaborators, husband and wife team Tatiana Bruni and Georgii Korshikov.
Bruni, a painter, theatre designer and graphic artist, designed settings and costumes for the Marinsky and Alexandrinksy Opera and Ballet houses in Saint Petersburg and worked as stage designer of the Kirov Ballet for over 50 years. Bruni's sketches for the costumes borrow a lot from geometrical colour blocking, they were indeed based on Constructivist values and were inspired by the aesthetics of agit-theatre, ROSTA Windows and artist-designed propaganda posters.
The ballet characters included the Red and white Russians, Komsomol members and kulaks, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Many years later, in 1979, Bruni re-imagined the costumes including among the others the Sportsman, the Textile-Worker, the Loafer and the pompous Bureaucrat, The Typist, The Drunkard, The Carter, the plump girlfriend of the factory clerk Kozelkov, the American Fleet (symbolised by a morbidly obesed American capitalist) and the Japanese Fleet.
The latter was represented by a Japanese officer with fang-like teeth. These two figures were created to lampoon the naval disarmament talks between the United States, Japan and two other nations enemies of the Soviet cause. They weren't supposed to be proper costumes, but sandwich boards, worn by dancers whose faces were visible through holes in the top.
The Bolt was not the first ballet based on industrial themes: El Lissitzsky's sketch for Victory Over the Sun (1913) is considered by critics as an anticipation of a mechanical ballet that would one day replace real performers with robots powered by electric currents, while the Italian futurist Fortunato Depero produced a "mechanical ballet" entitled Anihccam del 3000 ("Anihccam" is the specular spelling for the Italian word "macchina", machine) at Milan’s Trianon Theatre in 1924 that consisted in a futuristic dialogue between locomotives in love with a stationmaster.
Besides, in 1927 the Ballets Russes performed Les Pas d'acier (The Steel Step) with music by Sergei Prokofiev, choreography by Leonid Massine and set by Georgii Iakulov. This is considered by critics as a parable of the pitfalls of Soviet factory life as the humans were trapped by the machines.
Though Iakulov's interactive set was not built in the end, Bruni probably knew his work for Les Pas d'acier: her set includes a factory workshop and lounge and a village chapel among the other spaces, and the factory floor is a fantasy place where movements were experimented and machine dances took place. The sets of the ballet were an elaborate assemblage with special effects, lighting and moving décor.
Conceived as a satire, a caricature of proletarian dramaturgy and of the factory parables staged by the Theatre of Worker Youth in the late 1920s, The Bolt was strictly forbidden for being a ballet that rejected ballet norms and the rejection of those same norms, something proved by the photographs of the rehearsals.
The Bolt featured indeed movement and mimed episodes as the choreographer explored the possibilities of hybridising ballet with sport, acrobatics and circus, something that was considered as dubious but that is successfully embraced nowadays (hybridisation of high and low arts are the key to understand contemporary pieces such as The Most Incredible Thing with music by the Pet Shop Boys).
The Bolt went through several alterations before it was premiered and after it was withdrawn, it eventually died and nothing came of its planned revival. Yet it is truly worth rediscovering its story, inspiring costumes and sets and behind the scene photographic documentation. Visitors will also get the chance to hear Shostakovich's blend of proletarian music genres playing through the gallery space, catapulting them to early 1930s Russia and evoking Fedor Lopukhov's daring choreography.
The Bolt, GRAD: Gallery for Russian Arts and Design, 3-4a Little Portland Street, London, UK. Opening hours: Tue-Fri 11am–7pm, Sat-Sun 11am-5pm., 6th December 2014 - 28th February 2015.
Image credits for this post
1, 2, 3, 4, 15, 16, 17. Archive photographs from "The Bolt", Courtesy of GRAD and St Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music.
5. Tatiana Bruni, The Drunkard, Costume Design for "The Bolt", 1931, gouache and watercolour on paper. Courtesy GRAD and St Petersburg Museum of Theatre and Music.
6. Tatiana Bruni, Kozelkov, Costume Design for "The Bolt", 1931, gouache and watercolour on paper. Courtesy GRAD and St Petersburg Museum of Theatre and Music.
7. Tatiana Bruni, The Terrorist, Costume Design for "The Bolt", 1931, gouache and watercolour on paper. Courtesy GRAD and St Petersburg Museum of Theatre and Music.
8. Tatiana Bruni, The Typist, Costume Design for "The Bolt", 1931, gouache and watercolour on paper. Courtesy GRAD and St Petersburg Museum of Theatre and Music.
9. Tatiana Bruni, Kozelkov's Girlfriend, Costume Design for "The Bolt", 1931, gouache and watercolour on paper. Courtesy GRAD and St Petersburg Museum of Theatre and Music.
10. Tatiana Bruni, Olga, Costume Design for "The Bolt", 1931, gouache and watercolour on paper. Courtesy GRAD and St Petersburg Museum of Theatre and Music.
11. Tatiana Bruni, The Japanese Marine, Costume Design for "The Bolt", 1931, gouache and watercolour on paper. Courtesy GRAD and St Petersburg Museum of Theatre and Music.
12. Tatiana Bruni, Factory Worker, Costume Design for "The Bolt", 1931, gouache and watercolour on paper. Courtesy GRAD and St Petersburg Museum of Theatre and Music.
13. Tatiana Bruni ,The Carter, Costume Design for "The Bolt", 1931, gouache and watercolour on paper. Courtesy GRAD and St Petersburg Museum of Theatre and Music.
14. Tatiana Bruni, Komsomol Member, Costume Design for "The Bolt", 1931, gouache and watercolour on paper. Courtesy GRAD and St Petersburg Museum of Theatre and Music.
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