Two Russian dancers, pupils of the St. Petersburg school M. Surovshchikova-Petipa and M. Muravyev, toured the Paris Opera in turn in the early 1860s. Many reviews have been preserved, capturing the reviews of Parisian critics on their performances. The author quotes and analyzes the opinions and assessments expressed, from which one can get an idea of the dance, personalities, technical equipment of these legendary ballerinas.

The article explores the interest of European musical theater, primarily ballet, towards Indian themes and subjects. It focuses mainly on the genesis of two ballets on Indian topic: La Bayadère (1877) and The Talisman (1889), both composed by Marius Petipa in St. Petersburg. By tracing their Romantic and Orientalist legacy along with their literary and cultural influences, the article mentions all those scholars, travelers, writers and artists who left memories, scientific and literary works about India, that inspired M. Petipa for his ‘Oriental’ choreographies. Some previously composed operas and ballets such as Les Bayadères (1810), Le Dieu et la bayadère, ou la courtisane amourouse (1830), Giselle, ou les Wilies (1841) and Sacountala (1858), the prerequisites for M. Petipa’s appeal to stories from Indian mythology, are reveiled here along with those romantic and orientalist writers, and those co-authors of the choreographer, those music composers and the librettists, who closely collaborated with him for the creation of La Bayadère and The Talisman. Finally, a special attention has been given in this article to the dramatic features of the female main characters of those two ballets: the lovely and proud bayadère Nikiya and the apsaras Niriti, as well as to the first interpreters of those enchanting Indian leading roles.

This study is an attempt to examine Trisha Brown’s, the most influential American dancer and post-modern dance choreographer, ides about the human’s body movement through space on the example of some her performances of the 1960–1970s. The semiotic nature as well as conceptual methodological basis, which are characteristics of Brown’s body motion theory, is revealed. A typological study of the space of motion in Brown’s performances was conducted. The authors came to conclusion that in sample performances the choreographer was able to combine two-dimensional and three-dimensional space plans of bodily movements.

The article approaches contemporary European (mostly Italian) database of sources (bibliographic and historiographic) for Southern Italian folk dance research. The report proposes the chronological periodization for folk dance research, names the foremost researchers who laid the foundation for this research (the middle of the 19th – the beginning of the 21st century), and suggests the division of folk dances into several ethnic-choreological streams.

The article is referring to the «Les Six» group composers’ ballets, created in collaboration with representatives of two main combination companies – S. P. Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and R. de Mare’s Ballets Suedois. In the thirteen pieces of music by D. Milhaud, J. Poulenc, A. Honegger, G. Auric and G. Tailleferre are exposed varied treatments of the ballet genre, related with its active transformation in the first decades of the twentieth century. Talent’s characteristics of the mentioned above composers along with nontypical, sometimes far-off academic ballet scenographic and dance-plactic performances’ solutions have become creative impulse for experiments with ballet music. By the nature of transformations, the author splits the reviewed compositions into two categories: ballet scores closed to the established traditions and opuses, containing remarkable features of various genres’ interaction.

The paper considers aesthetical principles of Rudolf von Laban’s expressive dance (Ausdruckstanz) in the context of expressionism. As an example of stage movement and body mobility in a dramatic production, Georg Kaiser’ Gas staged by Les Kurbas (Kyiv, 1923) is analyzed. General laws of European expressionism and their implementation in plastic arts are identified.

The article is devoted to the problem of theatrical effectiveness of Leonid Andreev’s miniature plays. Analyzing them while applying historico-cultural, intertextual, and stylistic methods of research in the context of the cabaret culture of the beginning of the twentieth century, the author discusses the parodic devices, the sources of the comic, and the strategies of theatrical adaptation of the plays, as well as the reception of their staging by critics and ordinary spectators. Reasons for the lack of popularity of Andreev’s miniature plays are attributed to poor stage directing, which did not fully employed the plays’ entertaining properties, as well as to the changes of the audience in the new socio-cultural situation.

The article is devoted to a specific interpretation of space in the opera house of the Austrian composer Beat Furrer. On the example of the opera Fama, an analysis of spatial drama is carried out, as a result of which, the author comes to the conclusion that space and spatial gestures in B. Furrer’s music, play a thematic role.

The idea of a «concise narrative» becomes the lead. With the help of various filters and complex spatial organization, overlapping, converging at one point and diverging sound fields, Schnitzler’s story — the literary basis of the opera — appears as a sound drama, where the theatrical action itself is more likely to be background in nature, and space becomes the main character.

The article discusses the theory of intermedial art, developed on the basis of Action Art in the 1960s by American theorist and artist Richard (Dick) Higgins. The origins of this theory are traced in the practice of Avant-Garde art of the mid-twentieth century and in the socio-cultural context of the epoch. The manifestation of synthetic trends in the art of this time was expressed in other forms, which was unknown in artistic practices previously. This required a new theoretical foundation of this trend, which was carried out in the framework of Neo-Dada manifestos. Based on the analysis of these manifestos conclusions are drawn. They have shown the specifics of new hybrids that had arisen in actionist practices. As a result, a correlation between the transgressiveness of postmodern art and intermedial practices is found. Its led to the emergence of intermedia as an activity that destroyed the boundaries of art through new forms of synthesis.

The new realities of the digital era have influenced contemporary art and, in particular, cinema. Thanks to the digitization of moving images, they are becoming an increasingly common way of communicating in different environments. Their influence is so large-scale and powerful that their influence on the experience of interaction with objective reality. Visual, figurative, not only prevailing, but also its potential and social significance can play today the role that written literacy played in the era of enlightenment. Thanks to information technology, this problem is not in doubt, but many conflicting assessments arise regarding the quality of this information. Mass production of images in the media, especially on the Internet, is redundant. The resulting images are similar. Written literacy cannot convey the baton to widespread visual illiteracy. Cinematic literacy ‘Cinematic literacy’. In this article, you can determine the causes of the occurrence of information and communication disorders, reveal that educational and promising images are not enough, revitalize and diversify the exchange of visualized products, create the conditions for a full and high-quality information exchange.

The article considers the work of the Icelandic singer Björk, which exists in the border space between elite art and modern youth subcultures. Analyzing various samples of her work, the author comes to the conclusion that the principles of vocal work are similar to the methods of modern academic music, and the performativity of her work is connected with the ideas of the great actionists of her time such as Marina Abramovich. The conclusion of the study is the need for the existence in the common space of various forms of academic and non-academicart, which gives new impulses to the development of modern culture.