THE PERFORMING ARTS

While it may come as a surprise to U.S. persons over 30, the Soviet Union gave strong support to art and culture, including per-forming arts. The average citizen is well-acquainted with classical local and European works, as well as modern Soviet productions. The number of institutions in a city varied with size, but few had none. Almaty, with somewhat over 1 million people and the republic capital had at least six.

This is Almaty's opera and ballet theater. It is currently undergoing renovation. Before that, both ballet and opera tickets were normally sold out, especially for weekend performances.

In front of the theater are two large fountains, which double as playgrounds on hot summer days.

This is the theater named after Auzov, commonly known as the Kazakh Drama Theater. It hosts tradi-tional and modern dramatic works in Kazakh, as well as ethnic music concerts.   Across the street from this theater is the "Circus," another standard feature of Soviet cities. In Almaty there are regular perfor-mances of acts to those one might have seen in U.S. a circus.

This is the theater named after Lermontov, also known as the Russian Drama Theater. Here one sees performances of both dramatic works and musi-cals in Russian. During the remodelling of the Opera Theater, it also hosts opera and ballet performances.