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Porgy and Bess in the Soviet Union
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From the course by Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU)
Theatre and Globalization
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From the lesson
East versus West: Cold War Rivaleries
Theatre and the Cold War; theatre as a site of the rivalry between East and West.
Meet the Instructors
Christopher BalmeProfessor
Institut für Theaterwissenschaft / Department of Theatre Studies
After Stalin's death in 1953, there was a thaw in East-West relations.
And both sides were keen to demonstrate their respective cultural achievements.
The first American tour to the Soviet Union was the Everyman Opera Company,
composed of African American singers performing George Gershwin's Porgy
and Bess.
Was the US government prepared to actually fund theater tours of this kind?
>> It was not.
It was really not until 1955, that the US government made a formal declaration.
And, and created a fund to which performers, and producers, and so
on, could apply for money from the government.
However, even during the first couple of years of the tour,
because it toured from 52 to 56 it depended heavily on
local state department well, embassies and consulates as well as
funding from the military often helping with transportation.
But it really wasn't until the invitation to the Soviet Union
that they began to get more formal monies from the US government.
>> So what interest did the US government have in sending an American opera company
representing a modern opera about black people to the Soviet Union.
What was the agenda?
>> It's an interesting agenda and
a complicated one because the government was divided on this.
Some aspects of the government,
some elements of the state department felt that this was a bad idea.
Both because the content of the show seemed to demonstrate
that African Americans were still very oppressed in the United States.
And they were very concerned that the government, the US government would look
bad if they were not able to reciprocate with an invitation to Soviet artists.
Because at the time, the US had some very conservative, and restrictive laws,
that prevented members of the Communist Party from entering the United States.
So that faction of the government felt very strongly that it could only lead
to a kind of bad image for the United States abroad.
Other areas of the government felt very strongly that
sharing arts and culture from the United States with the world could only
benefit the United States, and make the United States seem a much more open and
creative and vital and vibrant country.
That side, those sides actually prevailed in part because
one of the chief champions of that argument was a man named Frank Wisner,
who was the sort of second-in-command at the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA.
He was also the architect of the overthrows of governments in
Guatemala and Iran.
And he felt very strongly that the message that the show brought about
the United States was a very, very positive one.
And so he pushed hard both on the State Department and the White House to
get permission for this show to go, which it eventually obviously did.
>> So, the United States government had a particular agenda, the Soviet Union had
another agenda, and these two agendas weren't exactly congruent?
So what was the agenda of the Soviet Union in inviting such a,
a show from the arch-enemy in he Cold War?
>> Yes, I think their agendas were like the United States, a bit mixed.
I think one agenda was simply that in being the first of
the two sides to receive a, a production from the other country.
They felt that this would make them look like the far more open and inviting
country and that the US had not formally received Soviet artists at the point.
So it made them look like they were setting the trend.
Also, this is really the beginning of the major thaw that Khrushchev would bring
as head of the Soviet Union.
Because of course during especially the post World War II years of Stalin's time
the Soviet Union was very, very closed off.
>> And of course the third party in this equation are
the performers themselves. What were their agendas?
I think we have to speak in the plural there.
Yes, I think that's absolutely right because of course,
maybe from the geopolitical point, standpoint there are perhaps not,
their agendas are perhaps not the most important, but
I do think from the historical and the theater standpoint
their agendas are often the ones that get erased, but are absolutely crucial.
And again, as you mentioned, their agendas were multiple.
For some of them, they were professional theater artists and this was a tour.
And they, it was a job, and it was a job that was an incredibly good one.
And for some of them,
it was really just being in that show that was enormously gratifying to them.
And I think there was also a third set of agendas, and of course,
some of other performers had more than one.
But that really did take great pride in representing the United States abroad.
One performer in an interview mentioned that, as a small child,
she had picked cottons in the fields of the south.
And she felt that the journey she had gone on,
where she would be a small child in the cotton fields,
to a major artist representing her country abroad, was an extraordinary one.
And she was very, very proud of that role that she was playing in the world.
So I think those were some of the agendas that those artists were
bringing with them as they traveled.
>> So on the actual tour, itself,
through the Soviet Union, did these agendas meet and conjoin?
What do we know about the reception of the show?
>> They did the reception was very interesting.
There's a record of the State Department briefing that the US artists received
before they left to Germany, which is where they departed the west,
because they went to the Soviet Union by train, not by plane.
And the State Department official told the artists
that the reception of the production had already been decided and they were a hit.
That they should not expect that the Soviet press was actually going to
engage in the production in the way that they might expect the Western press to.
However, translations of the reviews don't necessarily bear this out.
The reception was very positive in all the reviews.
Only really one of the reviews sounds like it's a party line sort of thing and
refers to the, characters as peasants, and
uses kind of the jargon one might expect from a kind of communist party organ.
But for the most part the reviews were positive but smart and
sophisticated about what they were seeing, and the quality of the performances.
They were very adept at understanding what those singers were doing and
were capable of.
So the reviews were actually quite interesting in that
the critics absolutely engaged with the material.
>> And such tours of course always imply or
include the fact that real human beings are interacting with other human beings,
and not just on stage, but also off stage.
So do we know anything about that side of the, of the tour?
I mean,
Are there interactions between the performers and the Soviet people?
>> Yeah, there are some great stories.
Eh, you know, they were, they were followed everywhere they went.
They did have kind of official minders who were from the Soviet side as well as,
of course, officials from the US embassy since it was an official tour.
However, they went shopping although again, these were very planned trips and
the stores they went to were carefully chosen, but they also,
there's one anecdote about Moses LaMarr, who was one of the Porgy's,
walking in the park and ended up singing for Soviet children.
Probably staged, but there were actual children and he did actually sing.
The most famous interaction is the fact that two of the performers got
married in the Soviet Union and the wedding was filmed.
Both for a Soviet newsreel documentary, but
it was also documented in LIFE magazine in the US.
And one of the reasons I think the Soviet Union was very happy to
host this event, was that it took place in a church and it allowed them to counter
some of the propaganda about religion's presence in the Soviet Union.
The church is packed.
And it's packed full of Soviet citizens.
>> So, it seems like this, was the first real tour of this kind in
the 1950s, it kind of contributes to the thawing of relations in a certain way.
Did this become a precedent for other productions to follow in its wake,
or did it remain a one off occurrence?
>> In terms of the larger look at the art, it did create a precedent for
the arts traveling between these two super powers.
But really, perhaps because of the language difficulties
perhaps because of the different kinds of theater cultures.
You know, there's many reasons for this.
It was really dance that became the kind of
major medium of exchange with, I think, music a very, very close second.
>> So jazz and things like that?
>> Exactly.
>> Yeah
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