The author of the article presents part of the riddles followed Sleeping Beauty  premiere by M. Petipa (1890). Keen ballet lovers were disappointed, Petipa was  reproached for the lack of choreography, and the public was defiantly disagreed  with negative reviews about ballet in the press. For the first time, the article  looks through publications about the preparation period and stage rehearsals of Sleeping Beauty. Selected quotes from reviews of the premiere itself show how  difficult it was for critics of that time to evaluate this masterpiece.

The article attempts to comprehend the Western European vector of  formation and development of Bulgarian ballet. The structural-functional and  factual methods, as well as comparison and generalization are used to analyze the  subject of the research. The article is based on the cultural-historical approach.  The diffusion processes of the German expressive dance spatial spread from  the region of origin in the direction demanded by the Bulgarian community are  highlighted. The contribution of the German expressive dance “key” figures —  V. Kratina, M. Tsoneva, S. Georgieva, L. Valkova-Beshkevich, M. Dimova —  to the professional dance art development in Bulgaria is specified. The strong  German culture innovations penetrated into the less developed, weak Bulgarian  “zone”, where objectively they could not have appeared. The conclusion is made  about the discreteness of the West European vector of the Bulgarian ballet  development, conditioned by the political context. Although the creations of the  German expressive dance representatives did not constitute a significant legacy,  their activities anticipated the new stage form — dance theatre — emergence.

The article highlights the origins of the birth and the initial stage of the  formation of the Vietnamese National Ballet as a new type of performing art  for Vietnam. The role and significance of Vietnamese classical and European  classical dances are shown. The process of their mutual influence and enrichment is considered. The facts not previously mentioned in Russian historiography,  the most significant ballet performances and works of small choreographic  forms created in Vietnam during the period under review are systematized and  presented. The names of outstanding Vietnamese composers, choreographers  and ballet dancers are introduced. The role of European ballet schools, including  the Russian school of classical dance in the training of Vietnamese ballet dancers  is shown.

Christian Johansson (1817–1903), a Swedish dancer, came to St. Petersburg  in 1840 and stayed here for the rest of his life. For more than forty years he  performed on the stage of the St. Petersburg Bolshoy Theatre as a dancer, and  for more than thirty years he taught at the Imperial Theatre School. As a dancer,  Christian Johansson performed in the main roles of the romantic repertoire,  creating images of noble heroes. He excelled in all the virtuoso arsenal of classical  dance and became an example for the male performance of several generations  of Russian dancers. Meanwhile, Johansson’s performing activity has not been the subject of independent study. This article is the first detailed study of  Christian Johansson’s activity as a member of the St Petersburg Ballet Company  and an analysis of his most important roles. The article is written on the basis of  materials of periodicals and the dancer’s personal file (kept in RGIA).

The article discusses the problem of the nationalization of ballet in China,  which has emerged on the agenda of Chinese art criticism since the early 2000s. The authors discover the presence of Marxist and Maoists ideas in the speech  cliché of “nationalization of ballet”, on the one hand, and goal-setting, on the  other; on historical examples they also examine how Mao Zedong’s focus on  “serving” the art of ballet to the working people contributed to the transformation  of the content and form of foreign (classical Russian and non-classical Western)  ballet in China. The authors come to the conclusion that the ideology of  nationalization contributed to the emergence of its own Chinese ballet with  “national characteristics” (Mao Zedong) at the beginning of the 20th century  and the establishment of the national Chinese ballet by the 1960s.

The article focuses upon a “historical shift” in professional thinking noticeable  in Russian musicology of the middle and late 1920s. This phenomenon is  considered on the example of published reviews of concerts given by Sergey  Prokofiev during his tour to Russia in 1927. The examining of the publications  reveals considerable changes in esteems of the composer’s work over 9 years  after his emigration: this is not only a shift in their general tone towards  acknowledgement, but also changes in the content of the reviews in which  Prokofiev was more and more often represented as a “classic”. The article  proposes a hypothesis that such judgements were inspired not only by changes  in the composer’s personal style but also by a substantial metamorphosis in  professional mind of the reviewers themselves. The reception of Prokofiev’s work  in Russia of the 1920s makes evident a process fundamental for musicological  discourse of that time: a redefining of the borders between the “old” and the  “new” music and of the common views upon their relations.

The article discusses the structure of a role-playing game in comparison with  the structure of a dramatic performance. Both the performance and the role[1]playing game let the spectator or participant “immerse” into the game reality due to a certain system of conventions. However, a spectator’s “immersion” is  based on empathizing with the character from the position of an uninvolved  observer, while a participant’s one results from occupying a role in the  imaginary reality. The spectator’s involvement into a theatrical performance  can be gradually enhanced with the help of certain elements of a role-playing  game through the use of role-playing game’s elements of structure, such as  role of the so-called “master” who controls the action; rules and instructions;  encouraging the participant’s activity within given circumstances; interaction  with other participants in state of immersion; simultaneous action. Ariane  Mnouchkine’s “1789” (1970) is cited as an example of transition between  theatrical performance and role-playing game. In this work a part of the audience  was involved in the action as a crowd of Parisians.

The article highlights a little-known episode in the creative biography  of Nikolai Nikolaevich Tcherepnin — his creation of the orchestration of  Robert Schumann’s piano cycle Papillons (op. 2). This score formed the basis for  the stage performance of the one-act ballet “Les Papillons” Michel Fokine (1912,  Mariinsky Theatre). The unpublished manuscript of Tcherepnin’s score Papillon,  kept in the Collection of the Mariinsky Theater Music Library, served as a material  for studying the specifics of Tcherepnin’s approach to the orchestral embodiment  of Schumann’s piano music. The peculiarities of the orchestra composition are  revealed, the techniques of Tcherepnin’s orchestral work are studied (in the context  of his attitude to Schumann’s orchestral style, in comparison with Tcherepnin’s own  orchestral style as a composer). The features of the score of Papillons are noted,  bringing it closer to the orchestral traditions of ballet music. It is concluded that  in his work Tcherepnin was guided not by the desire for stylization in the spirit of  orchestral techniques.

The article analyzes little-known facts from the history of the Western European  medieval theatre, which relate to the performing art of women in the mysteries  in the 15th – first half of the 16th century. Materials related to some historical  productions, in particular, to the Mystère de la Passion of 1501 in Mons (Belgium),  to the Mystère des trois Doms of 1509 in the little French town of Romans-sur-Isère,  as well as to the famous Valenciennes Mystère de la Passion of 1547 allow us to get  an idea of the performance of various female roles by the townswomen, both serious  (the role of the Virgin Mary), and allegorical and even comic. The article examines  not only confirmed data, but also hypotheses about the participation of women in performances (for example, in English and German mystery cycles), put forward  by modern scientists. The article cites rare historical documents that have not been  translated into Russian.

Film scripts, as the first stage of the development of the visual identity of  a film, possess their own film language, which consists of a combination of  expressive means that form the concept of the author’s world. Repetitive mise[1]en-scène and camera work figures in script language (synthomes) form a side  storyline in the structure of the script and the film, which support the main  dramatic conflict. The milestone of the 1990s-2000s, which introduced Russian  practitioners to the American form of screenplay, reactualizes the problem of  the film script form. However, screenwriters who were brought up in accordance  with the traditions of the Soviet film school continue to incorporate elements  of the author’s film language into their works.The research material for this  paper consists of the screenplay by Pyotr Lutsik and Aleksey Samoryadov  («Wild Field», 2003) and a number of episodes from the film of the same  name by Mikhail Kalatozishvili (2008). The artistic means of the screenplay  by Pyotr Lutsik and Aleksey Samoryadov are analyzed using elements of the  psychoanalytic concepts of S. Žižek and Vi. Mazin, as well as the poststructural  approaches of M. Yampolsky. Changes in the set of film language means  introduced by the director of the film affect the construction of the screenplay  and its structure in terms of turning points.

Counterpoint in the music of the twentieth century has acquired a whole range  of new properties. The qualitative transformation of counterpoint in the music of  the twentieth century is based on one of the general laws of modern harmony — the principle of free dissonance. The article discusses the history and essence of  the “dissonant counterpoint” concept. Free dissonance in counterpoint is explored  as a new expressive resource of polyphony, which can possess different semantic  interpretations and compositional functions. The qualitative characteristics  of the modern counterpoint depends on a wide range of sound parameters:  timbre, dynamics, agogics, texture, tempo (in contrast to classical counterpoint).  The author defines the general properties of counterpoint in the music of  the twentieth century, the most important of which is the subordination of  counterpoint in a particular work to the author’s method of composition (newly  invented or formed from an arsenal of available techniques). In the conclusion,  the article touches upon the issue of the widespread use of the counterpoint logic  in various arts and the inclusion of non-musical components in musical works.  The basic foundation of such syntheses is the principle of montage.

In this article the author analyzes various ways of recording academic music  and their subsequent listening, including both conventional stereophonic  methods and innovative multi-channel ones. The main question that the author  poses is in which of these ways can the listener get the feeling of “immersion”  in the sound space, as if he were in a concert hall? Both a binaural sound  reproduction system with the help of stereo headphones and multichannel  systems with loudspeakers are considered. Dolby Atmos is cited as a modern  system that creates the illusion of three-dimensional space when using stereo  headphones. The author presents the results of a study on a small test group,  showing that the modeling of three-dimensional space has a negative effect on  some criteria for assessing the quality of phonograms. At the same time, the  author sees great potential in the development of “immersive” methods of sound  reproduction, which allows a large number of listeners to experience the magic  of academic music.