SHORT ESSAYS ON COMMUNITY, DIVERSITY, INCLUSION, AND THE PERFORMING ARTS
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Odesa, 1920 Traveling throughout my adult life to the part of the world once known as the Soviet Union opened up a multitude of wondrous opportunities. The region is full of natural beauty, exciting cities and largerthan-life personalities. Yet even in the Carnivalesque wreckage of the region’s collapsed political system, nothing quite compares to the city of Odesa. Odesa is not just a place, of course. It is more of a state of mind, or, at the very least, websites for a virtual Odesa that exists in the imaginations of the thousands of former residents who have moved to places as varied as Moscow, Tel Aviv, Sydney, Toronto and Brooklyn. A “real” Odesa exists as much in the ironic short stories of the Odessa Tales by Isaac Babel, who was arrested and shot by Stalin’s NKVD, as it does in the compelling stage productions of Babel’s grandson, Andrei Maleev-Babel, who teaches acting in Florida. Odesa, in other words, is not just a city with a promenade with a famous staircase overlooking the Black Sea; psychically, it also extends from Siberia to Sarasota. It does so because, throughout its brief yet extravagantly tawdry history, Odesa has inspired people to create.
In her 2008 study Kaleidoscopic Odessa, anthropologist Tanya Richardson drew on the city’s complexities to explore how diversity and place combine to nurture innovation. Richardson wanted to understand how the city’s presumed peculiarities — its mix of nationalities, tolerant attitudes, cuisines, dialects, joie de vivre and sense of humor, southern temperament, resourcefulness and entrepreneurial spirit — defined a distinctive Odesan sense of place and history. For her, the various components of Odesa had been formed by the interaction of multiple lenses, which shifted as if through the prism of a kaleidoscope.10
The Odesan kaleidoscope began spinning from the very beginning. The city took shape in the mind of a Neapolitan soldier of fortune, José Pascual Domingo de Ribas y Boyons (Osip Mikhailovich Deribas), before it assumed physical presence. De Ribas was the child of a Spanish consul and his aristocratic Irish wife. He entered into Russian service in the 1770s after a brief stint in the Neapolitan army. While he was serving on the staff of Catherine’s lover and imperial strategist, Grigorii Potemkin, de Ribas caught the attention of his superiors by watching over Officially, Odesa was established in 1794. and covering over the multiple offenses of Catherine the Great’s frontier settlement the dissolute American rear admiral John and Black Sea port swiftly became a randy Paul Jones, who had come to Russia in mix of nationalities and cultures. It has search of fortune. remained so ever since.
