GATES Evening talk - Where is the Borysthenes? On Rewriting the History of "Russian" Ballet in Paris

Conférence / Recherche

On 28 November 2024

here is the borysthenes? On rewriting the history of "Russian" ballet in Paris

As part of the GATES project, an evening talk will be presented by Philip BULLOCK, Professor of Russian Literature and Music at the University of Oxford and MaCI Senior Research Fellow.

He will collaborate with Delphine Rumeau, UMR Litt&Arts co-director.

In this talk, Philip Bullock will present the early results of the research he has been carrying out here at Grenoble during his GATES fellowship. Broadly speaking, he is interested in the history of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, arguing that their "Russianness" masks a vastly more complicated set of national identities. His talk will address that general disciplinary line of enquiry. More specifically, he will present a case study of Sur le Borysthène, a ballet with choreography by Serge Lifar and music by Serge Prokofieff that opened at the Paris Opera in December 1932. Although not technically one of Diaghilev's ballets (he died in 1929), it incarnates the key aspect of his legacy. Most intriguingly, it is also a Ukrainian ballet – the title refers to an Ancient Greek name for the river Dnipro. Drawing on the extensive and often contradictory reviews in the French press at the time, the talk will ask why this aspect of the ballet has attracted so little attention, and how bringing it to light now might contribute to debates around the meaning of what is inaccurately, reductively, and misleadingly referred to as "Russian" culture".

Philip BULLOCK is Professor of Russian Literature and Music at the University of Oxford, and Fellow and Tutor in Russian at Wadham College. He studied Modern Languages (French, German and Russian) at the University of Durham, before completing graduate work in Russian literature at the University of Oxford. Before taking up his present post at Oxford, he taught at the University of Wales, Bangor, and University College London, and he has also held visiting fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton and the Institut d'études avancées de Paris. He has published widely on Russian culture from the late eighteenth century onwards, and his most recent books include Pyotr Tchaikovsky (2016) and – as editor – Rachmaninoff and His World (2022).

Delphine RUMEAU is Professor of comparative literature at UGA since 2021, after being a lecturer at the University of Toulouse - Jean Jaurès for more than ten years. She works on the relationships between American and Slavic literatures.

Le Projet GATES est financé par le Programme d’Investissement Avenir lancé par l’Etat et mis en œuvre par l’ANR France 2030.

Date

On 28 November 2024

5:30 pm - 6:30 pm

Localisation

Maison de la Création et de l'Innovation
Meeting Room 209 (Second floor)
Zoom : Link
Station Gabriel Fauré - MUSE

Admission

Free admission subject to availability

Contact

humanitiesfellowshipsuniv-grenoble-alpes.fr (humanitiesfellowships[at]univ-grenoble-alpes[dot]fr)