Overview of Tour

The audience is watching an opera at the Bolshoi theater in Moscow.

Swan Lake being performed by the Moscow Ballet. Swan Lake is a classic Russian ballet composed by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. 

Performance arts in Moscow has a vibrant history with both many different mediums and multiple time periods. Through this tour, we’ll cover theater, opera, ballet, and circus throughout the centuries through six cites in Moscow. We’ll see how that as Russia’s cultural and political scape changes, there are waves of new expressions and waves of oppression.

The origins of Russian theater can be traced back to foreign roots [1]. For the first theatrical performance in Russia in 1672 at the court of tsar Alexei Mikhailovich (grandfather of Peter the Great), the ‘Foreign Quarter,’ the section of Moscow inhabited by foreign military, commercial, and diplomatic personnel, supplied the director and actors [2]. In the early 19^th century, there were serf theaters – one of which we’ll visit (Ostankino Palace). In the 19^th century, Moscow and St. Petersburg became the center of theater, and opera – the Bolshoi theater the second one our stops is epitome. A pivotal construction of a theater was the one of the Moscow Art Theater (our third stop) by Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko in 1898 [2]. This construction can be contrasted with the Maly Theater and our fourth stop, the Lenkom Theater (or the Moscow’ State Theater) also built around the turn of the century (1907-1909). The last our stops is a circus, the Great Moscow Circus, a potential ground for Soviet propgranda.

1. Leach, Robert and Borovsky, Victor. A history of Russian theater.  Cambridge, 1999.  pg. 18.
2. Hughes, Lindsey. Russia in the Age of Peter the great. 2000, New Haven.
3. History of Russian Theater. April 3, 2006. Link.