Free dance in Russia. History and philosophy. Sirotkina I.

A new direction created by Isadora Duncan and its contemporaries changed not only our ideas about the art of dance, but also our attitude to the body, clothing, movement, lifestyle. This book is about changes in the motor culture of the 20th century, caused by the appearance of “free”, “plastic” dance, or “dance-modne”. The study talks about the discoveries that Duncan himself and her colleagues in the workshop (Emil Jacques-Dalros, Rudolf Laban, Mary Vigman and others), about its popularity in Russia and its many followers, as well as how a free dance developed and Transformed for a century. The uniqueness of the book is that in it the dance is considered in several contexts at once, including the history of culture and philosophy. Its first two parts - “will to the dance” and “art and science of movement” are historical, they tell about “di

onisian dance” as a mythology of the Silver Age, about the dance studios of the first third of the 20th century, relations, relations dance and music, "dancing of cars", biomechanics. The third part - the “philosophy of free dance” - is devoted to the role of dance and gymnastics of the beginning of the 20th century in the emancipation of women and “emancipation” of the body, dance as an art of “abstract”, aesthetic principles of free dance, the difference in the semiotic and phenomenological approaches to movement. This work is an important stage in an actively developing scientific discipline - studies of movement and dance. The first edition of the book was published in 2012 under the title "Free movement and plastic dance in Russia." The second edition included two new chapters: “Mass Soviet Dance” and “Semiotic and Phenomenological approaches to the movement”, as well as the new section “Duncan and Stanislavsky”.

Irina Sirotkina - cultural historian and anthropologist, leading researcher at the Institute of History of Natural Science and Technology named after S. I. Vavilov RAS.