Modernism – Still Images and Gifs
"Russian ballet and Duncan’s style of easy athleticism, drawn freely from her impressions of the naturalism of the Greek arts, had already proved fruitful inspiration for an earlier generation of Russian ballet artists when Michel Fokine, Sergei Diaghilev, and Anna Pavlova saw the American dancer on her initial triumphal visit to Russia in late 1904 and early 1905. The experience prompted them to incorporate a more naturalistic use of the upper body and a vocabulary of unhurried runs, skips, and jumps into their ballet. [...] Yakobson was the only Soviet ballet choreographer to make this reverse migration and create dances for the Isadora Duncan School. His larger project of developing ballet as a modernist form in the USSR both allowed and benefited from this exchange. It was as if he needed to go back to the same fountainhead of Duncan that had inspired the first modern dancers in America. [...] The fact that he could do this so readily with a genre outside of ballet—in this case, modern dance—suggests how complete his absorption was in discovering what it was possible for a dancer to do, rather than how to make that dancer fit an abstract ideal."