Inna Chernetskaia and her school of plastic art
Материал из HEPTACHOR.
INNA CHERNETSKAIA’S STUDIO OF THE PLASTIC ARTS
Elizaveta Surits
Inna Samoilovna Chernetskaia was born in Moscow, 29 of August 1894, was at school in Riga, went to the university in Berlin (in the natural sciences), then studied in Lausanne and Munich. In Berlin, she became interested in dance and took lessons at Elisabeth Duncan’s school in Grünewald. At that time Rudolf Laban gathered around himself many talented dancers, including Mary Wigman. Chernetskaia was immersed in this milieu. In her own words, her direct teacher was Alexander (Sacha) Sakharov, who gave a performance in Munich in 1910. She also went to an intensive (4-month) course in Hellerau with Jaques Dalcroze and studied painting. She thought of a new, synthetic art.
Returning to Russia, Chernetskaia took lessons in classical ballet with M. Mordkin, became close to the Moscow Art Theatre, studied drama and even worked for a while in the Free Theatre. In 1915, she opened her own dance studio in Moscow. She was not fully satisfied with any of the current movements –Duncan dance, German expressionism or ballet. Combining some of their features and adding acrobatics and drama, Chernetskaia aspired to create her own “synthetic” style. She also started choreographing for her pupils (among whom were those who later achieved some renown, like Srbui Lisitsian).
After the Revolution, her studio moved to the Caucasus; in 1920 she relocated it in Moscow. It acquired the status of a state-supported institution and for a while was part of various higher schools of dance and even an experimental laboratory of the research institute, the State Academy of the Arts. Chernetskaia herself was a research fellow there.
Among some of her most significant choreographies are “A Young Warrior” to the G-minor etude by Rachmaninov, “Prelude” to the music by Chopin, “Danse macabre” to Saint-Sans’ piece; pictures show resemblance with the work of the German dancers of the time . Like many of her contemporaries, she was inspired by Scriabin, to whose “Le poème de l’extase” she danced in the 1920s.
Most of her critics – among whom were the minister of culture in the Bolshevik government, A.V. Lunacharskii, the president of the Academy of the Arts, P. Kogan, and his deputy G. Spet – praised the depth and freshness of her dance. One critics even wrote (in relation to her work, “Mephisto”): “Chernetskaia has shown that, at least for some philsophical issues, dance is the best medium.” Her dance was often theatrical, with pantomime often dominating over dance. She undoubtedly had the talent of a stage director. Many of her dances presupposed the existence of the second person. Sometimes she played several “characters”. Gradually she involved her numerous students in her choreography. She received wide acclaim as a creator of new art forms, alongside such celebrities as Eisenstein, Prokofiev and the Leningrad Chamber Theatre.
Her closeness to the Ausdruckstanz is evident: not only did she pay visits to German dancers and gave lectures on the topic in Moscow, she also had similar theoretical inclinations. She wanted to reflect on and to give a theoretical foundation to her art. In the earlier 1920s, she published several academic articles. Her studio work practically stopped in the mid-1920s. For a while, she choreographed for Moscow theatres, including the Jewish Theatre. In 1937 her brochure, “Main Elements of Dance”, was published. It makes a rather sad read, for it has none of the excitement and reflective character of her 1920s work; to the contrary, the brochure is full of primitive pseudo-Marxist formulae which, at that time, were compulsory for any publication. Chernetskaia died in 1963.
