The creative portrait of the renowned choreographer Angelin Preljocaj has been shaped by the efforts of French researchers into his works, with contributions from articles by Russian critics as well. Preljocaj’s productions across various genres often explore themes of cruelty, inhumanity, and extreme violence. Against this backdrop, the large narrative ballet La Fresque, which tells a story of fantastical ideal love, stands out particularly. Coolly received by foreign critics, this ballet is virtually unknown in Russia, having been performed only once on 11 June 2018 at the Voronezh State Opera and Ballet Theatre as part of the Platonov Festival. In analyzing the performance, the author identifies expressive elements that allow for the conclusion that La Fresque is atypical among Angelin Preljocaj’s works and highlights the reasons why Western critics overlook the artistic discoveries made by the choreographer in this ballet.

The article presents the results of a comparative analysis of the concept of «interpretation», common to both ballet studies and dance studies. The author demonstrates different approaches to the interpretation of this phenomenon in ballet studies (the aspiration towards the most complete decoding of the musical score as an invariant) and in contemporary dance studies, which interprets the performance in the spirit of Hans-Thies Lehmann’s postdramatic paradigm as a dehierarchized textual space. Using the historical-genetic method, the article traces the transformation of the term «interpretation» from a hermeneutic procedure to a performative act of collective meaning-making. Through the comparative method, the author proposes a hypothesis that the polarized critical assessments of contemporary choreographic performances stem from the collision of two perspectives: the academic one (fidelity to the musical conception) and the postdramatic one (the cult of processuality). The article identifies the distinct functional and teleological foundations of interpretation within the academic and postdramatic approaches and substantiates the necessity of updating the terminological apparatus of dance studies in the context of the rapidly expanding range of expressive means, particularly due to the mediatization of art.

This article is dedicated to the 60th anniversary of I. D. Belsky’s production of the ballet Eleventh Symphony to music by D. D Shostakovich at the Leningrad State Academic Maly Opera and Ballet Theater. It examines the significance of the ballet-symphony as a dance-based expression of the national idea of freedom, the spirit of revolutionary despair, and hope in music. This comprehensive analysis examines the production’s choreographic design, its musical design, and the specific visual embodiment of its dramaturgy. The author supplements existing information about the ballet with new summaries from interviews with its performers, detailed characteristics of the choreographic text, and identifies its leitmotifs.

The article examines the use of methodology of using photographic materials in Russian works on classical dance from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Using Vladimir Stepanov’s “Choreography, Akim Volynsky’s “Book of Ecstasies: . The Alphabet of Classical Dance, and the second and third editions of Agrippina Vaganova’s “Principles of Classical Dance” as case studies, the analysis focuses on different approaches to incorporating photographic fixation. In Stepanov’s book, photography functions as a tool of structural analysis and as a means of correlating pose, movement phase, and choreographic notation. In Volynsky’s text, photographic images operate as visual substantiation of theoretical claims, linking plastic form to philosophical categories. In Vaganova’s manual, photographic series become pedagogically normative exemplars: the image captures an execution regarded as canonical, thereby participating in the mechanisms through which the standards of the Soviet ballet school were shaped and transmitted. This comparative perspective not only systematizes the functions of photographic material but also clarifies the place of early photographic resources in the development of Russian ballet pedagogy.

The article develops an approach to defining dancefilm as a system of artistic practices within the context of an expanded understanding of choreography (from dance notation and stage composition to a universal toolkit applied to organizing various processes in an artistic project). The study examines the concepts of expanded (A. Leon), social (A. Hewitt), bioaesthetic (C. Rohman), and more-than-human (M. Frischkorn) choreography. The practical possibilities of this expanded understanding for an artistic project are revealed through the research of A. T. De Keersmaeker and B. Cvejic, which reconstructs the choreographic process as a system of procedures distributed across various media and agents. Based on the identified theoretical and methodological foundations, the principle of variability in choreographic thinking within dancefilm practices is described.

The 1938 American edition of The Golden Cockerel is not a translation of A. S. Pushkin’s fairy tale, as stated on the title page, but the result of W. Pogainey’s personal involvement in productions of the opera-ballet and opera The Golden Cockerel based on A. Belsky’s libretto and set to music by N. A. RimskyKorsakov. An American artist of Hungarian descent, W. Pogainey designed Adolph Bolm’s production at the Metropolitan Opera in 1918, and then the 1937 production at the same theater. The combination of color and black-and-white illustrations in the book reflects the capabilities of both theater and film designers, as W. Pogainey envisioned it at the time. The color illustrations reflect the stage presentation of the plot (though not directly reflecting the actual set design), while the black-and-white illustrations reflect the cinematic presentation.

The article is dedicated to the word in the ballet The Twelve after A. Blok by the outstanding Russian symphonist of the second half of the 20th century Boris Ivanovich Tishchenko The composer worked extensively with music for choreographic productions, and even more extensively with diverse literature, prose, and poetry. The literary-centric features of Tishchenko’s work are widely known and have been noted by many Soviet musicologists and fellow composers. The leading extra-musical source of Tishchenko’s music is the intonation of both everyday and poetic human speeches. This is reflected in the ballets The Twelve, based on Alexander Blok’s poem; The Fly-Tsokotukha, based on K. Chukovsky’s fairy tale; and, finally, in the grandiose choreosymphonic cycliad Beatrice, based on Dante’s Divine Comedy. Tishchenko, while remaining true to the fundamental principles of symphonic development, deeply and uniquely interprets the poetic word, uniting musical theater, symphony, and oratorio into a new, essentially original genre, unparalleled in Russian music.

The article examines the genre metamorphoses of burlesque in the context of the 20th century piano music with a particular focus on performance interpretation. Burlesque is analyzed as a genre-stylistic principle based on the paradoxical combination of comic and serious, high and low elements. The study traces the evolution of burlesque from its literary origins to musical art and reveals the distinctive features of its embodiment in the works of composers of the first and second halves of the twentieth century, including Max Reger, Gustav Mahler, Béla Bartók, Alfredo Casella, and Dmitri Shostakovich. Special attention is given to the piano cycle Six Burlesques (1958) by Sergei Slonimsky, in which burlesque functions as a universal mode of artistic thinking. The article emphasizes the role of the performer as an active co-creator of meaning, highlighting the importance of texture, articulation, dynamics, and timbre in revealing the multi-layered imagery of the cycle.

This article provides an overview of the subject matter of composer Pierre Boulez’s essay «Fertile Land: Paul Klee», in which the leader of the postwar European avant-garde addresses the theoretical and artistic legacy of one of the most prominent figures of the European avant-garde of the first decades of the 20th century. The fundamental principles of Boulez’s analytical approach are systematized in relation to Klee’s compositional strategy. References to texts on art by the composer’s contemporaries, poststructuralist philosophers M. Foucault and G. Deleuze, are used as context, testifying to the commonality of several ideas. One of the overarching conclusions of both the original essay and this article is the universality of Klee’s proposed methods, their affinity with the fundamental vectors of Boulez’s own structural approach, formulated in the 1950s and 1960s.

The cultural memory of Russian-Serbian cooperation preserves numerous historical facts that allow us to connect with the past, reconstruct it, and preserve important, even fateful, events that bind us together through a shared history and common spiritual values. Knowledge of these facts enhances our understanding of past experiences, reveals forgotten and half-forgotten names that contributed to strengthening cultural ties between peoples, and opens up prospects for exploring our shared heritage. Among these, the work of Russian choirmasters in the singing societies of the Serbian city of Šabac exemplifies fruitful collaboration. Choirmasters from Russia (Vasily Kuzenko, Vsevolod Dudnik, Sergei Krasovsky, and Vladimir Kuragin) brought with them and incorporated the technique of “big sound” into the ensemble’s work. Their educational activities, rooted in rich Russian culture, contributed to the artistic growth of residents of the cities of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, and later Yugoslavia. Having received an influx of Russian talent during the interwar period (1918–1941), whose names have gone down in history, a musical environment began to emerge here that was responsive not only to church and folk music, but also to the classical music of European and Russian composers.

The article addresses the problem of methodology in contemporary art history, wherein the traditional notion of the linear development of art history creates a situation in which it becomes impossible to adequately describe contemporary artistic practices. Its point of departure is Hans Belting’s concept of the “frame” (Rahmung), according to which art remained enclosed within the framework of art history until the growing discrepancy between systems of description and classification led to its breaking out of the frame (Aus-Rahmung), rendering the former system inoperative. The author analyzes attempts to overcome this crisis through the work of Arthur Danto and Peter Osborne, both of whom sought to redefine “contemporary art” yet remained within the same logic of the frame. As an alternative, it proposes a shift in the key question guiding our engagement with art toward a performative model, drawing on the work of Erika Fischer-Lichte and Jacques Ranciere. The central principle of this model is an in focusing to the emergence of meaning within the event, rather than within a discrete object. Drawing on three works: Hammer by Alexander Ekman, Earthquake by musicAeterna Dance (choreographed by Jo Stromgren), and Gym Live Performance by Shortparis, the article demonstrates that performativity should be understood not as a genre or format, but as a mode of perception. In this mode, the artwork ceases to be an object of interpretation or deciphering and instead becomes a space of shared experience.

This article explores the root sculptures of artist and composer Mikhail Matyushin − a unique genre he created in the early 1910s, designed to express the idea of movement in an original way. This topic has previously been underexamined, particularly in terms of attribution. Of the surviving works in this genre, the vast majority lack precise dates and artist titles. However, a study of archival materials (photographs taken by the artist himself, commentary from those close to him, and exhibition catalogues from his lifetime) allows us to recover lost names and pinpoint the creation dates of the earliest root sculptures, now housed in the State Russian Museum. This new information allows us to gain a deeper understanding of the evolution of the genre and the ideas Matyushin laid at its core − in particular, to explore the special role of plasticity, movement, and dance in the artist’s work.

The article is devoted to César Cui’s children’s opera The Snow Bogatyr, one of the earliest and most representative examples of the genre in Russian music. Despite its sustained popularity in performance practice, the work remains largely under‑researched in scholarly literature. The authors focus on the musical dramaturgy of The Snow Bogatyr, examined in the context of folklore tradition and canons of opera. Analysis reveals that the structural patterns of the magical fairy tale determine the specifics of the composition and imagery structure of Cui’s opera. The musical dramaturgy demonstrates the composer’s deep understanding of genre conventions, with a clear orientation towards the model of the classical «grand» opera adapted for children’s perception. Despite the constraints of a one‑act format, the author incorporates traditional forms such as recitative, arioso, duet, ensemble, and chorus. It has been established that the imagery and intonational sphere of The Snow Bogatyr features an extensive corpus of quasi‑quotations, allusions, and reminiscences that evoke the national musical tradition – namely Russian folklore and composers’s works of the 19th century. These intertextual connections are driven not only by artistic aims but also by didactic goals: to build auditory experience and to foster an operatic thesaurus among young listeners and performers. As a result, Cui’s The Snow Bogatyr serves as a vivid introduction for young audiences to 19th‑century Russian opera and, more broadly, to Russian culture.