About

Anne Searcy is an Associate Professor of Music History at the University of Washington's School of Music. She holds a Ph.D. in Music from Harvard University and a B.A. in Music and History from Swarthmore College. Her research focuses on the intersections of music, politics, and dance in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She is currently working on a book titled Choreographing Minimalism: Music, Neoliberalism, and the Creation of Contemporary Ballet, which explores the post-mid-century era in U.S. dance funding and how avant-garde composers and choreographers integrated minimalist music and postmodern choreographic techniques into ballet, thereby transforming the relationships between time, space, movement, and subjectivity in American ballet since the 1950s. Her first book, Ballet in the Cold War: A Soviet-American Exchange, analyzes cultural diplomacy programs between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, focusing on ballet tours by the Bolshoi Ballet and American companies. Searcy has also published articles on topics such as the ballet Spartacus and the musical Hamilton. As an educator, she teaches courses on classical and popular music, American musical theater, Soviet music, and embodiment, emphasizing the use of writing projects to develop thinking and communication skills.

Research topics

• Art
• History
• Visual arts
• Art history
• Literature

Selected publications

• <i>West Side Story</i> Abroad as an American Icon

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-01-21

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• The Soviet Context: <i>The Rite of Spring</i> at the Bolshoi Theatre

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-06-28

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• Dancers on a Grid: Musical Minimalism Arrives at New York City Ballet in 1983

  Journal of the Society for American Music · 2022-10-25

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  Abstract On May 12, 1983, New York City Ballet became the first major ballet company to perform a work to minimalist music: Jerome Robbins's Glass Pieces , titled after its score by Philip Glass. The premiere came at a turning point for both minimalism and ballet. The dance world was reeling in the wake of the death of choreographer George Balanchine. Simultaneously, minimalist music was in the process of moving from countercultural avant-garde venues to wealthy, high-status institutions. Although previously minimalist music had helped postmodern choreographers create works that celebrated everyday movement and equality among dancers, for Robbins minimalist music conjured a sense of urban propulsion. In each of the ballet's first two sections, Robbins choreographed to Glass's music in two ways simultaneously: A group from the corps de ballet used the egalitarian techniques from postmodern dance to create a modern urban backdrop, while another group of soloists used virtuosic techniques from modernist ballet. This allowed audiences to shift their focus at any given moment between the anonymity of the corps and the heroic subjectivity of the soloists. In the third section of Glass Pieces , Robbins staged a virtuosic group dance for the corps de ballet, using Glass's exoticist music for Akhnaten to create an escape from the relentless modernity of the first two sections. Altogether, I argue that Glass Pieces is one of the earliest works of contemporary ballet and an important step in minimalist music's transition from its earlier heyday as a music representing countercultural egalitarianism to one representing the modern city.

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• Alexei Ratmansky’s Abstract-Narrative Ballet

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2021-04-14 · 13 citations

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  Abstract Alexei Ratmansky’s works challenge the way that Western critics and choreographers split ballet into abstract and narrative categories. This chapter explains how Western ballet arrived at the division between abstract and narrative. This developed out of the ideology of absolute music, the understanding that music could not have any meaning other than a purely formal one. During the Cold War, American choreographers such as George Balanchine took up the belief in absolute music in order to push against Soviet models of ballet. The Cold War also encouraged Western ballet experts to conflate abstraction with progress. Within this context, the chapter analyzes Ratmansky’s Russian Seasons (2006), which can appear as both abstract and narrative to its audiences. Ratmansky’s career thus challenges many long-held assumptions in the West about forward progress in ballet.

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• Dedication

  2020-10-29

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  Subject Dance and Music Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

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• Ballet in the Cold War

  2020-10-22 · 20 citations

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  Abstract During the Cold War, the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union developed cultural exchange programs, in which they sent performing artists abroad in order to generate goodwill for their countries. Ballet companies were frequently called on to serve in these programs, particularly in the direct Soviet-American exchange. This book analyzes four of the early ballet exchange tours, demonstrating how this series of encounters changed both geopolitical relations and the history of dance. The ballet tours were enormously popular. Performances functioned as an important symbolic meeting point for Soviet and American officials, creating goodwill and normalizing relations between the two countries in an era when nuclear conflict was a real threat. At the same time, Soviet and American audiences did not understand ballet in the same way. As American companies toured in the Soviet Union and vice versa, audiences saw the performances through the lens of their own local aesthetics. Ballet in the Cold War introduces the concept of transliteration to understand this process, showing how much power viewers wielded in the exchange and explaining how the dynamics of the Cold War continue to shape ballet today.

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• A Cold War Welcome

  2020-10-22

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  Abstract Chapter 1 discusses the Bolshoi Theater’s first tour of the United States in 1959. While the popular response was rapturous, critics were more cautious. They praised the company’s dancers, particularly the Soviet ballerinas, but disparaged the choreography and music. This split was gendered and allowed critics and audiences to sympathize with the performers while condemning the ostensibly more political works themselves. The chapter focuses on Sergei Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet and Stone Flower. Because Prokofiev’s music was so well known in the West, tour organizers hoped that his music could mediate between American expectations for Russian ballet and newer Soviet models. However, the Soviet performers failed to convince Western critics that their ballet was sufficiently “modern,” a complaint that would permeate American criticisms of the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War.

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• Notes

  2020-10-29

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  Subject Dance and Music Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

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• Bringing an American Report Card to Russia

  2020-10-22

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  Abstract Chapter 2 analyzes American Ballet Theatre’s (ABT’s) often-overlooked 1960 tour of the Soviet Union. The tour took place under highly fraught circumstances. Ballet was considered a uniquely Russian art form in both the United States and the Soviet Union. At many points in the spring and summer of 1960, both the Soviet and American governments threatened to withdraw support from the tour. In dealing with these concerns, ABT director Lucia Chase developed a strategy for presenting her company and the United States as the leader of an international, elite art form. Through repertoire and casting choices, she balanced the troupe’s profile, showing it as both an international company and an American organization. Moreover, the company’s American works bore striking similarities to Soviet drambalety and were therefore praised by Russian critics for displaying common aesthetic and political values. Much to the surprise of everyone involved, the strategy was successful.

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• Introduction

  2020-10-22

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  Abstract The Introduction argues that reception is key to understanding cultural diplomacy. Using an analogy to the process of transliteration, it shows that audiences interpreted cultural-exchange performances through the parameters set out by their own aesthetic backgrounds and expectations. Just as the sounds of one language are read through the symbols of another in the process of transliteration, so too in cultural exchange performances are sounds, gestures, and forms of a ballet read through the aesthetic contexts of the host country. During the Soviet-American ballet exchange, the resulting aesthetic misinterpretations determined the impact of a cultural diplomatic event. As such, the Introduction explains how dance and music impacted political attitudes during the Cold War. This then also provides a model for understanding the relationship between music, dance, and politics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

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