The article examines the artistic practice of the interdisciplinary collaboration between dance artist Trisha Brown, visual artist Fujiko Nakai, and engineer Billy Kluver. Based on the methodological principles of object-oriented ontology, this article analyzes the interdisciplinary project «Opal Loop / Cloud Installation» (1980), created at the intersection of choreographic art, environmental installation, and computer technology. The artistic and technological principles used to create the choreographic text, scenographic environment, and technologies that smooth the interaction between different disciplines are identified. The article discusses the process of reconstructing the media performance «Opal Loop», produced in 2015. The theoretical significance of the study lies in highlighting little-studied concepts and principles of media art. The concepts of mapping and recursion are introduced into the context of choreographic theory and practice as fundamental to interdisciplinary collaboration.

The academic discursive system of Chinese art studies operates with several definitions of the concept of “ballet”, which form the basis for both historical and theoretical research in Chinese dance (ballet) studies. The article analyzes the generic notion of ballet, which, in Chinese scholarly context, breaks down into conceptual varieties, namely: “classical ballet”, “European-type ballet”, “Chinese European-type ballet”, “national ballet”, and several others. A brief characterization of the key derivative definitions of “ballet” is provided, correlating with the danceological approach implemented in Chinese art studies and the broader political strategy of nationalizing European classical ballet.

This article examines the communicative function of dance improvisation as a key element of artistic expression in contemporary choreographic art. Based on an analysis of the evolution of ideas about the body in the 20th and 21st centuries and William Forsythe’s creative experiments, it shows how improvisation becomes not only a pedagogical tool but also an independent mode of artistic communication between performer, choreographer, and audience. Special attention is given to the formation of the “universal dancer” — a performer able to move freely across different dance techniques and to incorporate spontaneous creation into the structure of a stage work. This article reveals the role of improvisation in expressing performers' individuality, their bodily awareness, and fostering kinesthetic empathy in audiences. It shows that improvisation largely determines the communicative potential of contemporary dance and can serve as one of the main expressive tools for artistic meaning. 

Béjart produced “A Winter Night’s Dream” (1953), “The Taming of the Shrew” (1954), “The Shakespeare Suite” (1960), “Romeo and Juliet” (1966), “Hamlet” (1989) and “King Lear – Prospero” (1994).

This article will focus on Bejar’s little-known joky ballet, compiled from various Shakespearean plays, “La Suite à Shakespeare” (“The Shakespeare Suite”), 1960, Ballet-Théâtre de Paris (Ballet Theater of Paris), on Duke Ellington's suite “Such Sweet Thunder”. The ballet was studied thanks to the television version saved in the Department of Audiovisual and Information Technologies of the St. Petersburg State Museum of Theatrical and Musical Art. The choreographic idea, key directing techniques, features of the plastic language, the set design and the musical basis are considered in this article. A conclusion is drawn about the artistic merits of the production.

The article examines the use of dance in Soviet war films, in the center of which is the image of a teenager. Even in the silent period, dance was included in the system of expressive means of cinema. Subsequently, the range of possibilities of this art in screen interpretation expanded. Dance is part of the character's objective, material, and subjective world. It becomes an integral part of the film's on-screen artistic space, and therefore structural analysis reveals its diegetic or metadiegetic nature. Since the content of the dance in the context of the film corresponds to the director’s intention, semantic analysis allows us to identify its semantic meaning. Cinema engages not only the visual and spectacular aspects of physical and dynamic creativity, but also its cultural and social implications. Therefore, even when off-screen, the theme of dance is an important element of the characters' motives and thoughts. The author comes to the conclusion that stage, social, and folkloric forms of dance each in their own way form an audiovisual image of a childhood destroyed by war, declaring themselves as a unique means of expression.

The article is devoted to three ballets of Russian composers, namelly House by the Road by V. Gavrilin, Cranes Fly by V. Uspensky, Dubrovsky by V. Kiktya, which include solo and choral vocalizations in their sound artistic fabric, as well as vocal and speech elements (chanting and pronouncing poetic text, screaming). In each case, these non-typical expressive means were attracted by composers in accordance with the peculiarities of the content and poetics of literary primary sources, as well as their own musical personality. It has been revealed that with general trends in the treatment of the vocalization genre, composers use its expressive and dramatic possibilities differently, but convincingly in the artistic aspect.

This article explores the collaborations between Italian composer Luciano Berio and choreographers on two of his works – a theatrical composition with choreography entitled Exposition (Esposizione) (1963) and the ballet The Triumphs of Petrarch (1974). During the creation of these two works, the composer had a complex experience collaborating with outstanding choreographers who represented radically different aesthetic and conceptual positions: postmodern dance practitioner Anna Halprin and one of the greatest choreographers of the 20th century, Maurice Béjart. The results of these efforts also varied: in one case, dissatisfaction with the compositional inconsistency of the elements served as the basis for the composer's rejection of the idea of publishing the score; in the other, an original contemporary ballet was produced, which was repeatedly performed and transferred to the stage of La Scala. The conclusion of the procedural study is the thesis about the initial choreographic nature of Berio's music, focused on the nature of the performing gesture, connected with the historical instrumental context and articulation in the verbal component of the composition.

The article highlights the need to draw attention to the internal, philosophical, and spiritual aspects of the dance phenomenon. To this end, the three main Chinese philosophical teachings (Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism) have been examined for their meanings that correspond to the nature of dance as such and Chinese traditional dance, including the identity of the nature of dance and the nature of thought, sincerity as "opening up to the outside," being "in the middle" as the realization of openness and sincerity, the intensity and fullness of a sincerely open worldview, and the expression of joy in feeling full. By presenting these positions as the basis for understanding Chinese traditional dance, we emphasize their significance as the foundation for understanding dance in general.

The article is dedicated to researching the teaching methodology of N.M. Dudinskaya, an outstanding ballerina and pedagogue, who was a key figure in preserving and developing the A.Y. Vaganova system. The analysis of the surviving records of Dudinskaya lessons will provide a comprehensive overview of her pedagogical legacy, which must be preserved for future generations.

The monograph by Boris Asafiev “Symphonic Etudes” (1922) is almost unanimously recognized nowadays as a classic work, which in many respects created a paradigm of Russian opera research. Meanwhile, for the contemporaries of its author, the significance of this work lay in another aspect. One of its first reviewers, later on a remarkable musicologist, Roman Gruber argued in his critical review that Asafiev's book laid the foundation for a consistent contemplation of music through a prism of organic worldview. The organic concept of the world promoted by Henri Bergson and Nikolay Lossky was, indeed, an important platform of Asafiev’s thought throughout the post-revolutionary period. One of the results of his address to these ideas became the development of his authorized concept “sounding substance” which was often mentioned in the musicologist’s works of those years. The paper concludes that an essential stage in comprehension of this concept was achieved by Asafiev in his “Symphonic Etudes” where, in the course of analysis of musical material, a number of valuable remarks on the nature of this phenomenon and its manifestations in music was suggested (sometimes for the first time in the author’s work).

This work is devoted to the opera by Vladimir Dashkevich, a classic of contemporary Russian music, based on Yuli Kim’s libretto The government inspector after Nikolai Gogol’s comedy of the same name, which is the subject of close scientific attention for the first time, ensuring the novelty of the material presented. The aim of the study was to identify and systematize the intertextual connections found in the libretto and musical score of the opera, as well as to determine the role of borrowings and self-borrowings in the formation of the semantic space of musical comedy. Along with the main literary source, the libretto draws on lines from Gogol’s novel Dead Souls, the comedy The Gamblers, quotations from Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades, an allusion to the poem Devils, a phrase from his fiction, and the title of A. N. Ostrovsky’s comedy There Was Not a Penny, But Suddenly Altyn. Five self-quotations have been identified in the music, introduced into the opera to characterize the Gorodnichy’s wife Anna Andreevna, his daughter Maria Antonovna, and Khlestakov’s servant Osip. All of them are borrowed from film scores created by the tandem of authors over several decades.

The article is devoted to the study of the features and directions of the transformation of the artistic paradigm in the 20th – 21st centuries. Considering the metaphysical counterrevolution in art using the example of M. Duchamp’s “innovative projects”, the following were analyzed: the anti-artistic turn from art to anti-art, the transition from the metaphysics of the spirit to the physiology of corporeality, the process of alienation from feelings, the de-actualization of figurative thinking and the denial of the sacred. The prospects for research in this area are the transition from the artistic languages of art in its classical sense to the artificial ‘newspeak” of anti-art and modern art practices.