Hola y’all, it’s the beginning of a new quarter and we’ve already gotten our new project for PLP. As you may remember from earlier this year, we’ve been looking at WWII for the history part of Socials so obviously the next step would be to look at the after math of the war and how Canadian life developed afterwards. Which is exactly what we’ve been doing for our new podcast episode.
Now there’s some extra essence to this project with working with the Deep Cove Heritage Society and all. However, what I’ll talk about in this post is the research I ended up doing after we learned what the project was so I would know what direction I wanted to go in. This research ended up with some interesting results.
What I found was that after WWII there was a very big divide between the east and the west, or from Europe to the americas and Asia, specifically for ballet. This divide is what created the two main style of ballet we know today, you have your more contemporary and free flowing ballet style that was created in the west from people like George Balanchine.
Yet in the east, they went much further into the classical ballet style with much more ridged movements and demanding choreography. This is a divide that is still very prominent today with many stereotypes coming from this about Russian Ballet dancers and teachers where they’re stoic, mean, and will push you to your limits and further beyond.
To connect that back to our current project, this is a great example of continuity and change from WWI. Where these styles and stereotypes were created from a very real divide in the world and have only grown through the years. However, from those initial years, the two sides have been able to intermingle and these once place specific styles have been allowed to grow throughout the world and allow dancers to pick which avenue they prefer.