Jia Ruskaja nel ritratto di Anton Giulio Bragaglia

Jia Ruskaja was an important figure in the Italian dance history, as a performer, a choreographer and a pedagogue. She arrived in Italy around 1921 and met Anton Giulio Bragaglia, who was a director, a theorist and a historian. Thanks to this encounter, she was able to undertake her dance experiments, first at the Casa d'Arte Bragaglia, then at the Teatro degli Indipendenti. Starting from 1925, the collaboration between Ruskaja and Bragaglia evolved from a purely creative-productive to a more speculative level. In fact, between 1925 and 1926, they produced a series of articles in the magazine «Comoedia» and the publication La danza come un modo di essere (The dance as a way of being, Milan, 1927-1928). The present study explores the different aspects (performative, speculative and pedagogical) of Ruskaja's activity influenced by Anton Giulio Bragaglia through the study of reviews, articles and essays produced by the two artists. The study also points out the contribution of Ruskaja’s dance and pedagogic experiments to the Bragaglia's theory and highlights the affinities between the texts signed by Ruskaja with the aesthetic notions of the Enlightenment and the concepts of the Jean-Georges Noverre’s Lettres sur la danse et les ballets (1760). Finally, the research focuses on the various questions posed by La danza come un modo di essere (for example authorship and sources of images) and the original elements inside the book (the concept of improvisation and the didactic programming integrated between the theoretical and the practical).