This screening complements the exhibition Promote, Tolerate, Ban: Art and Culture in Cold War Hungary, a collaboration with the Getty Research Institute that is on view at the Wende Museum of the Cold War in Culver City from May 20 to August 26, 2018.

Following the screenings, Forgacs will be present for a Q&A. 

Ballet was part of the high drama of the “culture wars,” as the US and USSR jockeyed for position during the Cold War. The Soviet Union produced some of the greatest dancers the world has ever known, with the Bolshoi and Kirov companies as standard bearers. But there were also painful losses, such as the defections of star dancers Nureyev, Makarova, and Baryshnikov, and the stifling of dance innovation during a time of great creativity in the West. How did the culture wars fit into the larger context of Soviet and American ballet, and the place of dance in Soviet life?

Sun Mu, trained by the North Korean army as a propaganda artist, managed to escape in 1998 via China, Laos, and Thailand to South Korea. He uses the officially sanctioned painting style of socialist realism, inspired by propaganda posters from the Chinese Cultural Revolution under Mao Zedong, to create images filled with criticism and irony in the style of American Pop Art and Soviet Sots Art. This is the first exhibition of his work in the United States.