The influence of Émile Jaques-Dalcroze on the art of movement in Revolutionary Russia

Émile Jaques-Dalcroze’s Eurhythmics had a significant influence on art forms involving movement in Russia before and after the 1917 Revolution, a period of intensive artistic experiment. Jaques-Dalcroze sought to teach musicianship through developing sensitivity to rhythm and pitch, using movements of the whole body and aiming to make the musical experience open to all. Rhythmic Gymnastics or Rhythmics, as the work was usually termed in Russia, contributed to mainstream and avant-garde arts developments, then the revolutionary project of arts for the masses. Rhythmics fermented experiment in dance, stage movement work and musicality in theatre, as excitement grew about the potential for rhythm to be applied to all arts as a principle uniting internal and external phenomena, verifiable by natural science. In addition, Rhythmics, as artistic expression through movement, was important to the rejection or deconstruction of the “word” that characterized the modernist era. Jaques-Dalcroze's work was explored by many artists, including the great Konstantin Stanislavski (1863–1938) of the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) founded with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko in 1898 and by avant-garde director Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1940) in the context of his development of an actor-training method called Biomechanics after the Revolution. Rhythmics therefore had a significant part to play in the developing theatre and dance performance of Revolutionary Russia, in mainstream and experimental arts work and in educational and therapeutic contexts, mapped for the first time in this chapter.