A Science of Dance: Alexey Sidorov’s Choreology – МЕЖДУНАРОДНЫЙ ЖУРНАЛ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЙ КУЛЬТУРЫ

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Irina E. SIROTKINA
Independent researcher, PhD
e-mail: isiro1@yandex.ru
ORCID: 0000-0002-6090-7005

A Science of Dance: Alexey Sidorov’s Choreology

Abstract: «Contemporary dance» is not that young – it is more than a century old. Exactly in the months when the journal issue appears, there will be a centenary of the first Russian-language monograph titled Contemporary Dance. The work by Aleksey Sidorov was published as a brochure in the winter of 1922–1923. In spite of the hard times that the country was going through, a need for such a book was obvious: the 1920s were marked by the boom of new dance worldwide including Russia. During that decade a new discipline for dance, choreology, was created by the dancer, choreographer and researcher, Rudolf von Laban, in the West, and by the art scholar, Alexey Alekseevich Sidorov, in Russia. In his capacity of the Academic Secretary of the Russian Academy of Artistic Sciences, Sidorov founded the Choreological Laboratory (1922–1929) and himself took an active part in describing and analyzing dance movements. He made sketches and notes and used photography to capture dance movements and to create a system of dance notation. In his search to schematize movement and find an abstract language for dance, he followed into Vassily Kandinsky’s steps. At the same time Laban in Germany worked on his dance notation and his choreutic, or the analysis of movement in space. Besides, both Laban and Sidorov considered themselves proponents of Heinrich Wölfflin and other scholars who developed Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, or general art studies, a methodology that examined art practices and not just works of art, and did it by scientific methods. Sadly, the flourishing of new dance and its scholarship in Russia was cut short. The majority of studios and schools of the new, free dance, or danse plastique, ceased to exist by the 1930s. And the unique project of choreology as scientific dance studies still remains incomplete.

Key words: movement, dance, dance studies, choreology, Sidorov, Laban, Wölfflin, Kandinsky, general art studies, dance notation, SAAS.

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For Citation:

Sirotkina, I. (2022) A Science of Dance: Alexey Sidorov’s Choreology. International Journal of Cultural Research, 4 (49). 6–19. DOI: 10.52173/2079-1100_2022_4_6

DOI: 10.52173/2079-1100_2022_4_6