The main attention of Russian media in the last weeks was surprisingly not focused on foreign affairs, nor the war in Ukraine or even on the raging brush fires in South Siberia, which killed at least 29 people, caused several dozen towns to be evacuated, and left thousands homeless.
Instead, the main subjects of media attention in Russia were several seemingly secondary cultural events.
This February Novosibirsk State Academic Opera and Ballet Theater had premiered Wagner’s opera Tangeizer. The young director transferred the events of the opera into modern days. Among the many images on stage was a poster depicting a crucifix near the image of a naked woman. The image raised protest of local Orthodox Christian believers. They took the director of the theater and the director of the opera to court, accusing them of offending the feelings of believers. Local prosecutors threw out the case.
Nevertheless the authorities closed the production and fired both the director of the production and the director of the theater, one of the best in Russia.
And to top this off, Russian president Vladimir Putin awarded a state medal for “service to the homeland” to Alexander Novopashin, the Novosibirsk priest, who started the campaign against Tangeizer.
It’s not an accident that the next object of a cultural scandal in Russia was an American film, which was due to release this month. Child 44 is a typical thriller showing a Russian police hunt for a serial child killer set in 1952 Moscow. I haven’t seen the film but, according to most Russian serious film critics, the film is not different from most of Hollywood period films about Russia. It’s entertaining but not very authentic.
The film is playing now in US. The New York Times‘ review characterize it as “Znot too terrible, but znothing great, either.” Before now, films of this type have never been banned in Russia.
Russian Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky has complained that the film “depicts Russians as physically and morally sub-humans”. As a result this film, previously officially approved by authorities, bought by Russian distributors, dubbed and included in the program of many theaters, was banned.
But withdrawal of the American film from screenings wasn’t the main event of the past week.
The most discussed event in Russian media happened unexpectedly with an April 12 appearance on YouTube of a video of a teenage students’ performance in a dance school in Orenburg, a Ural provincial city. In less than three days the video gained more than five million views. The dance was called“Winnie-the-Pooh and Little Bees. But really it was just a recording of a lesson for a popular dance known as “twerking”.
Here is the Wikipedia’s description of this dance, which was created in 1990-s in US and now became one of the most popular dances in the world:
“Twerking (/ˈtwɜrkɪŋ/) is a type of dancing in which an individual, usually a female, dances to music in a sexually provocative manner involving thrusting hip movements and a low squatting stance.”
Twerking is routinely used by many popular international stars, including teenage groups. One example from Wikipedia:
“In 2005, a trio of teenage girls founded The ‘Twerk Team’…. Since the foundation of the team, they have been posting videos of them gyrating and shaking their butts, to a point that it’s artistic. It was called ‘YouTube’s foremost ass-shaking troupe’ by gossip website Gawker. As of December 2012 their channel had a total of more than 74 million views and more than 250,000 subscribers. Their Twitter account has about 115,000 followers.”
Thousands of dance schools all over the world, including Russia, teach teenagers how to twerk. Many Russian teenagers are surprised by the unexpected back lash by Russian media upon their discovery of the video Winnie-the-Pooh and Little Bees. For those teenagers the dance is just a part of their life.
Russian prime time TV news started off last weekend showing a demonstration.
Do they seem provocative? International stars also look provocative when they are twerking. Shocking elders is their aim, the same way as more then hundred years ago provocation was the aim of the dancers of the cancan, and later it was the aim of the dancers of boogie-woogie. Waltz and tango also were considered shockingly provocative in their time.
Meanwhile the dance school in Orenburg is closed and the prosecutor’s office is searching for those to be panished under criminal law. The scandal is growing.
So who do the Russian blame?
Twerking is represented as exported from the USA for the purpose of undermining the morals of Russian youth!
On April 14, Mikhail Borschevsky, a prominent lawyer and an official legal representative of the Government of the Russian Federation, commented on the “Little Bees” schandal in his radio interview:
“An age of bigotry had already started in Russia. Started in full. It is everywhere, it is all over the place. This phase reflects a psychological shift of our society. This is not the 21st century, it is the Middle Ages.”
