Moving center stage: Dance and Modernization in Late Twentieth Century Montreal

Writing about the thousands of amateur and semiprofessional dancers who were soon to descend on a local dance competition on April 26, 2016, the homegrown newspaper of the off-island Montreal bedroom community of Terrebonne, Journal La Revue de Terrebonne noted that the Montreal region of some four millions souls was home to as many dance schools — 96 — as Italy.1 That weekend, 10,000 dancers would arrive at an otherwise unremarkable suburb of about 100,000 nestled on the St. Lawrence River’s north shore, thereby confirming once more that Montreal had become one of the world’s hot spots for dance.Homegrown dancers and choreographers were not just local, of course. At the same time as the Terrebonne dance invasion, Montreal companies were appearing on stages around the world, often to rave reviews. Performance dance has entered the soul of Quebec where, just over a half-century ago, the art form had been all but banned by the moral strictures of clerical traditionalists. The city’s and province’s explosion in all manner of dance — and other arts — tracked remarkable political, social, cultural, and spiritual transformations that swept across Quebec society throughout the mid-twentieth century. The story of dance offers one insightful piece of the larger tale of a sudden embrace of modernity

James H. Bater, The Soviet city

Ruble Blair A. James H. Bater, The Soviet city. In: Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations. 36ᵉ année, N. 4, 1981. pp. 718-720

Moving center stage: Dance and Modernization in Late Twentieth Century Montreal

Writing about the thousands of amateur and semiprofessional dancers who were soon to descend on a local dance competition on April 26, 2016, the homegrown newspaper of the off-island Montreal bedroom community of Terrebonne, Journal La Revue de Terrebonne noted that the Montreal region of some four millions souls was home to as many dance schools — 96 — as Italy.1 That weekend, 10,000 dancers would arrive at an otherwise unremarkable suburb of about 100,000 nestled on the St. Lawrence River’s north shore, thereby confirming once more that Montreal had become one of the world’s hot spots for dance.Homegrown dancers and choreographers were not just local, of course. At the same time as the Terrebonne dance invasion, Montreal companies were appearing on stages around the world, often to rave reviews. Performance dance has entered the soul of Quebec where, just over a half-century ago, the art form had been all but banned by the moral strictures of clerical traditionalists. The city’s and province’s explosion in all manner of dance — and other arts — tracked remarkable political, social, cultural, and spiritual transformations that swept across Quebec society throughout the mid-twentieth century. The story of dance offers one insightful piece of the larger tale of a sudden embrace of modernity

Leningrad: shaping a Soviet city

Throughout much of this century, cities around the world have sought to gain control over their urban destinies through concerted government action. Nowhere has this process of state intervention gone further than in the Soviet Union. This volume explores the ways in which local and regional political, economic, and cultural leaders in Leningrad determine the physical and socioeconomic contours of their city and region within such a centralized economic and political environment.The author examines four major policy initiatives that have emerged in Leningrad since the 1950s - physical planning innovations, integrated scientific-production associations, vocational education reform, and socioeconomic planning - and that have been anchored in attempts to plan and manage metropolitan Leningrad. Each initiative illuminates the bureaucratic and political strategies employed to obtain economic objectives, as well as the bureaucratic patterns which distinguish market and non-market experiences. The boundaries for autonomous action by local Soviet politicians, planners, and managers emerge through this inquiry