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Extra research

The Bolshoi Ballet:

Later in the rehearsal process we found that if we kept researching throughout the rehearsal period our performance would keep improving. We found out about the Bolshoi ballet later in rehearsal and the information we found helped us have a deeper understand of the arts in the time period of the Russian revolution.  The ballet company was formed in 1776 and is one of the world’s oldest ballet companies. "Bolshoi" translated from Russian to English means “the great ballet", throughout the 19th century there where many prestigious choreographers like Marius Petipa who was one of the most influential ballet practitioners, famous for his choreography of swan lake, the nutcracker and sleeping beauty. http://www.roh.org.uk/people/marius-petipa. It also saw people such as Carlo Blasis an Italian ballet teacher and writer. He was the fist write technique's , history and theory of dancing in his "Traité élémentaire, théorique, et pratique de l’art de la danse." https://www.britannica.com/biography/Carlo-Blasis 

However the original name of the company was Petrovsky Theatre and they only took the name " Bolshoi" when the Moscow in 1825. At the time of the revolution the ballet company was adjusting in become a porn of the state, the company changed its face to a "revolutionary" face that was completely inspired by the Pravda (communist propaganda) many of the ballets created during this time featured the criticism of western culture and a template for a soviet government like "the red poppy". During Stalin's dictatorship it was difficult for new material to be successful with the amount of censorship and with the shifting demands of the sate it was simply safer for the company to re-perform old works. After the revolution and once things where staring to settle back again after world war one, by 1930 ballet simply was not popular anymore, however it slowly gained popularity again and by 1950 Ballet was used as an ideological and diplomatic tool, shaping how other countries saw Russia, ever since the Soviets first began sending dancers on overseas tours, to wow Western audiences with their mastery of the art form. http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20170628-the-ballet-that-caused-an-international-row


 


https://www.bolshoi.ru/en/about/hist/history/ The official Bolshoi ballet website, unfortunately in their history they don’t mention the company during the revolution sadly they only mention before and after.


The Gulags:

The gulags where soviet forced labour camps an abbreviation of "Glavnoye Upravleniye Ispravitelno-trudovykh Lagerey" which translates to English as "Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps” from 1920 to 1950 these camps held thousands of political prisoners and in 1930 was under control by the KGB (secret police) in the beginning the camps held100,000 prisoners but after expansion by Starling they held 5,000,000 of what we know. But their is a real possibility that this number was even larger and kept growing until Starlings death in 1953.  Conditions of the camps where horrendous, prisoners could work up to 14 hours a day with physical labour they at primitive tools and the gruelling weather condition s like the freezing cold. Many workers simply died either from the exhaustion, illness or  freezing to death. The authorities in charge of the camps saw the works as less than human and those who died of hunger, cold, and hard labour were replaced by new prisoners because the system could always find more people to replenish the labour camps. https://www.britannica.com/place/Gulag

Some the most notorious camps where  those like Kolyma, the name struck fear into the Gulag prisoner. Reputedly the coldest inhabited place on the planet, prisoners spoke of Kolyma as a place where 12 months were winter and all the rest summer. Kolyma was so remote that it could not be reached by an overland route. Prisoners travelled by train across the length of the Soviet Union only to spend up to several months on the Pacific coast waiting for the few months each year when the waterways were free of ice. Then, they boarded ships for their trip past Japan and up the Kolyma River to their gold-mining destination. Surviving Kolyma was more difficult than any other Gulag . http://gulaghistory.org/nps/onlineexhibit/stalin/work.php

‘Corrective‘ is something that should make you better, and ‘labor‘ ennobles you. But ‘camp‘? A camp wasn‘t a jail. So then what on earth was going on? ” - unknown (Evfrosiniia Kersnovskaia Foundation, Moscow.)

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