Three Loves for Three Oranges: Gozzi, Meyerhold, Prokofiev Edited by Dassia N. Posner and Kevin Bartig with Maria De Simone. Russian Music Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021; pp. xxxi + 427, 61 illustrations. $50 cloth, $49.99 e-book.

Abstract

actresses Phillips examines in previous chapters. A short Conclusion follows up with productive comparisons between past and present celebrity pregnancies. Phillips gives us more than the usual “learn from the past” history-teacher didactics, however; she reinforces the importance of taking seriously celebrity as a cultural indicator of what matters then and now. She also gives us a methodology for reading archival evidence of past celebrity performances alongside the ephemeral performances and archival data of the present. Anchoring our readings of both archive and performance in the functions and needs of the human body, Phillips claims that“[t]he essential needs of the reproducing body— space, access, rest—have not changed, and embodied experience today can inform our sense of its history” (216). This is not to say that Phillips essentializes the reproductive female body; rather, she reads it as a part of the complex workings we call culture. Phillips reveals an eighteenth-century theatre industry that assumed their female stars would be pregnant at times during their careers and adjusted to that fact, offering women paid time off, shorter hours, and generally what we might today call accommodations. These conditions make the present working conditions of women in theatre, as Phillips summarizes them, look pretty lousy. The body— including that troublesome body part, the uterus—is integral to what Tschida calls the “life or well-being” of women, not just as childbearers, but as workers. This book makes it clear that how we attend to the body and its needs is not just a matter of individual well-being. It is also integral to the health of the body politic.