Creative Economy: A Feasible Development Option

4,600 in the 1990s to about 85 at present; as a result, nationalaudience was 45 times lower in 2005 than in 1990. Despitethis negative trend, Romania has seen increased production oflong, medium and short films and TV serial films. Accordingto the European Cinema Yearbook, in 2006 Romania had onescreen for every 200,000 inhabitant. The nation’s advertisingmarket, however, is expanding. A national program implementedfrom 2006 to 2009 sought to stimulate crafts production,improve artisans’ access to information, and promoteproducts obtained by simple technologies, mainly manuallymanufactured using traditional technologies. It also soughtto stimulate domestic demand for such products as well as togain entry into new external markets, especially for traditionalproducts, and to increase the number of jobs by attractingyouth and women. 77Russia: The Russian government has been looking intothe creative industries as part of its effort to develop and modernizethe country. The city of Moscow is undergoing animpressive transformation, merging the old and the new andsupporting creative clusters that bring together public and privateinvestors. Emphasis is being given to the fields of design,architecture and new media. A number of buildings constructedin the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are being transformedinto cultural centres, art galleries, artist studios oradvertising agencies. Defunct factories are being renovated tohouse clusters of artists, architects and designers. A goodexample is the former Bakhmetevsky Bus Garage. Built in1926, it has been fully renovated and reborn as the GarageCentre for Contemporary Culture, now one of Moscow’sleading venues for contemporary art shows. To support suchinitiatives, the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture andDesign is launching a postgraduate program for specialists in2The development dimensionthe fields of design, architecture and new media. 78 63Box 2.8The Bolshoi: A sublime gift to the worldThe Bolshoi Theatre is one of the most famous cultural institutions not only in Russia but also around the world. However, this has not always been the case.Bolshoi’s history goes back to March 1776 when the Russian Tsarina, Catherine the Great, granted Prince Urussov exclusive rights to organize performancesand masquerades in Moscow. In four years – by 1780 – Petrovsky Theatre was built for the company on the exact spot where the historic building of theBolshoi Theatre now stands, at the place that today we call Teatralnaya Square. Only after the big fire of 1805, when the building was ruined, and in orderto preserve the company was the decision taken for it to come under the Emperor’s theatres, which eventually included the Mariinsky (renamed the KirovTheatre for part of the twentieth century), Aleksandrinsky and Maly Theatres in St. Petersburg and Maly Theatre in Moscow. With the Russian capital locatedin St. Petersburg, all major musical theatre events during the nineteenth century took place at the Mariinsky rather than at the Bolshoi.After the October revolution of 1917, the capital was moved to Moscow and the situation drastically changed. All the best artists were invited to Moscow.Prior to that time, Anatoly Lunacharsky, who was the Cultural Minister of the new Soviet Republic, had to win a major battle in order to convince authoritiesthat ballet and opera were not a mere bourgeois form of distraction but rather a truly great art that expresses the national glory of Russian peopleno less evidently than any economic, social or scientific achievements.The importance of art as an ideological tool was understood quite rapidly by the communists and throughout the twentieth century, State support to theBolshoi was outstanding even in the most difficult times. Stalin himself was often a guest in the official box of the Bolshoi Theatre. Galina Ulanova, MarinaSemionova, Olga Lepeshinskaya, Maya Plisetskaya, Vladimir Vasiliev – these are only some of the names of legendary dancers who made the BolshoiBallet synonymous with the highest standards in classical ballet. From the first Bolshoi international tour in 1956, the Western world was confronted witha new face of Soviet Russia – talented, human, touching and expressive.Today the Bolshoi Ballet Company comprises 220 dancers and is the largest classical ballet company in the world. It has faced some difficult times, however,particularly in the early 1990s after a decade of perestroika where the State for a while lost interest in the company; all former privileges wereerased, all former relations were broken. The company had to find its place in the new country and it took several years to do so. The situation wasaggravated owing to internal artistic crises. When Yury Grigorovich had to leave his post as chief choreographer after holding the post for 30 years, theBolshoi Ballet Company was torn apart by different creative forces and no interesting projects materialized for years.In 2000, Anatoly Iksanov was appointed General Director of the Bolshoi Theater and had to meet several challenges. One of the main ones was therenovation and reconstruction of the historic building of the company, which had been without any major renovation since 1856. The particular natureof the Bolshoi is that opera, ballet, orchestra and building all form an outstanding cultural institution known in the world as the Bolshoi. Hence duringrenovation, it was important not merely to reinforce basement and walls and to install new stage equipment but first of all to preserve a unique company.77 Associations such as Professional Association of Folk Art Producers (ROMARTIZANA) or the National Association of Crafts Co-operation (UCECOM).78 As reported by the Institute for Russia and Eastern Europe, in the context of its Creative Compass Project, whose aim is to enhance mutual understanding between Europeancountries by promoting multilateral cultural cooperation between EU countries and Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Available from http://www.rusin.fi.CREATIVE ECONOMY REPORT 2010