The Ideas of Emile Jacques-Dalcroze's Rhythm Plastic in the Dance Studios of Soviet Ukraine From the Late 1910s to the Early 1920s

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to analyse the processes of spreading the ideas of E. Jacques-Dalcroze's rhythm plastic education in the practice of dance studios in Soviet Ukraine as a manifestation of modern aesthetics. The research methodology is based on the principle of historicism, methods of analysis, comparison, deduction, art studies analysis. The scientific novelty of the article consists in updating the methodology of perceiving the rhythm plastic education system of E. Jacques-Dalcroze not as narrowly specialised, but as a general culture, which allows us to talk about rhythm in the work of choreographers as a concept of Ukrainian modernism; in the introduction into scientific circulation of materials clarifying and supplementing the panorama of the spread of the E. Jacques-Dalcroze system in Soviet Ukraine. Conclusions. In the process of crystallisation, the rhythm plastic theory of E. Jacques-Dalcroze did not remain narrowly specialised, focused only on the education of the rhythmic sense of music through movement, but spread in various artistic spheres, allowing the use of the principle of bodily rhythms to understand changes in the tempo of life in a process of global civilisational changes (industrialisation, urbanisation, among others). Despite the paradoxical nature of the concept of rhythm plastic education by E. Jacques-Dalcroze (combining obedience to the internal laws of the rhythmic structure of a musical piece with a free physical and plastic expression that is not regulated by any choreographic system), it became popular both among professional dancers and choreographers and captivated hundreds of amateurs. Rhythm became a unique artistic concept of Ukrainian modernism, manifested in the work of several dance studios of B. Nizhynska, A. Pashkovska, E. Wulf, Shaposhnykova-Vekhovych, and others), which used the system of E. Jacques-Dalcroze as a way of updating the traditional choreographic vocabulary, expanding possibilities of dance art in the new socio-political and artistic-aesthetic situation. Despite the positive perception and creative elaboration of the system of E. Jacques-Dalcroze in several artistic centres, in particular, choreographic studios, in the mid-1920s in the Ukrainian SSR, in the situation of the gradual collapse of the studio movement and the intensified reorientation of cultural policy from the diversity of creative manifestations to monovectorism, we observe a sharp criticism of Dalcroze's principles.