LIKE A BOMB GOING OFF, by Janice Ross (Yale). Almost every interesting Russian choreographer of the twentieth century either emigrated or had his career destroyed. This biography illuminates one exception: Leonid Yakobson. As Ross writes, he situated enough dark material—conflict, grotesquerie, eroticism—in the marble halls of Soviet ballet to qualify as a modernist. This and his Jewishness led to constant harassment; he was told to change casts, costumes, endings, and to try out his latest piece on a student group, a Moldavian folk-dance ensemble, or whatever. Ross’s book is short on evidence, but that’s not her fault. Yakobson’s work was rarely filmed, and the reviewers were forbidden to write about him.
The above is the fourth review found at
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/11/briefly-noted-all-involved .
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