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By the early 1930s, the question of whether ballet should be incorporated into Soviet culture had been answered in the affirmative. And yet, questions remained about how to transform the former court art into an art form for mass Soviet audiences.

Drawing upon archival stenographic records from discussions involving dancers, choreographers, librettists, stage directors, critics, bureaucrats, and others, Title VIII Research Scholar Lee Singh will show that the discussions boiled down to three main questions: what subjects were appropriate, how to structure ballet stories, and what kinds of embodied storytelling methods were appropriate for Soviet ballet. Singh will demonstrate that, while socialist realism was becoming artistic policy in the Soviet Union, artists themselves contributed much of the practical expertise and creativity required to make ballet "socialist" and "realist."  And in ballet, at least, socialist realism proved artistically generative.