Plain folk

The Moiseyev as ethno-pop granddaddy

by Marcia B. Siegel

It was 1958 when the culture impresario Sol Hurok brought the Moiseyev Dance Company (then called the Igor Moiseyev Folk Dance Ensemble) to America for the first time. We were in the middle of the Cold War, the year after Sputnik severely undermined the image of American technological superiority. The world seemed splintered into unstable and incompatible entities. Cultural exchange was one of the few international successes of the time, and the Moiseyev's sensational debut at New York's Metropolitan Opera House, followed by a sold-out US tour, symbolized a rapprochement with the Soviet Union that was still far in the future.

The Moiseyev's visit had a huge artistic impact, too, though it certainly wasn't the first time Americans had seen folkloric material adapted for the stage. Most 19th-century ballets incorporated staged ethnic dances -- from the csárdás to the candle dances of Hindu bayaderes -- as a contrast to strict classicism. Katherine Dunham's Afro-Caribbean shows of the 1940s, despite their hot investiture, were choreographically developed rituals based on Dunham's serious ethnographic research.

In fact, one of Igor Moiseyev's innovations may have been the elimination of plotlines and ritual authenticity, and the distillation of each regional number to its visual and theatrical high points. The strategy worked so well that the Moiseyev troupe, performing in Symphony Hall last Sunday at the beginning of a new American tour, still follows it. Each of the 14 numbers introduced its participants with a flourish, then paraded them in colorful patterns that set up a series of specialty movements, tricks, or jokes.

Even though the Moiseyev claims to have drawn from Russia's many ethnic groups (I suppose the pool is quite reduced now that the Soviet Union has de-unified), the numbers all seem to share the same choreographic vocabulary. The emphasis is on the legs, with a generous, expansive upper body. Women and men step from side to side, accenting the phrase with a kick or a circular leg gesture, and often crossing the legs with a twist of the lower torso. The men's acrobatic tricks involve jumping into a low squat from which they suddenly spring up into a split jump or a high kick. Or they scramble along in the same squat, sliding their legs out to the front or the side at super-speed.

The Moldavian dances -- Zhok, for instance -- begin with orchestrated Gypsy airs and dim lighting. Women dance in perfect unison lines. Men display fast stepping and solo bits in friendly competition. Then the men and women pair up and create even more dazzling precision designs. The dancers are personalized, but generic, as they engage in coy flirtations, roughhouse wrangling, and pantomime conversations that recur from one number to the next, with only slight variations.

Only in the Jewish Suite was there any narrative pretext, a Ukrainian wedding, but the bride and groom were relegated to roles as centerpieces in a men's and a women's circle of congratulatory friends. Two patriarchal characters dominated this celebration, gesturing broadly in some unspecified but not too serious argument, and the rest was dancing display -- chains of beautiful women, an acrobatic men's trio, and a group of eight men weaving through rows of wine bottles. This last effect somehow didn't come off, but the men returned anyhow for an encore to "Hava Nagila," which instantly galvanized the audience into a clapping and singing accompaniment.

The Moiseyev show always includes favorite numbers like Partisans, where 20 soldiers in voluminous black capes glide magically around the stage. Even though you've seen it before and know the dancers aren't on skateboards, your eyes insist they can't be moving so fast on their own two feet. Three women now join the men in this piece, but when they throw off their capes and get down to dancing, the same gender distinctions apply as in the village dances. The women step sideways, displaying their ankles and upper torsos. The men do fiery acrobatics.

The Moiseyev is the granddaddy of today's ethno-pop dance spectacles: Riverdance, hip-hop, and the rest. It was the first to exploit the beguiling mass effect, not as corps de ballet or Broadway chorus line, but as folk spectacle, a somehow highbrow, not quite esoteric art form. In fact, maybe folkloric dance like this helped crack open the rigid boundary between high and low art on the dance stage. When we look at it today, though, it seems stereotyped and nostalgic for a "folk" that never was.