ARTIFICIAL HELLS

artificial hells
the model was variety theatre, which had lower- class connotations, and
tended to comprise a non- sequential appearance of spectacle, gymnastics,
slapstick, singing, anatomical monstrosities, and so forth. 8 Variety theatre
asserted the Futurists’ allegiance to popular culture; moreover, it had its
own spectatorial conventions, aiming to place the audience at the centre of
an experience, which was already the aim of Futurist painting: the artists
proclaimed that, using techniques such as simultaneity and force- lines, the
spectator ‘must in future be placed in the centre of the picture. He shall not be
present at, but participate in the action’. 9 Marinetti’s 1913 manifesto on
variety theatre – first published in London’s Daily Mail and subsequently
in Paris, Rome and Milan – explained the appeal of this dynamic spectatorial
relationship:
The Variety Theatre is alone in seeking the audience’s collaboration. It
doesn’t remain static like a stupid voyeur, but joins noisily in the action,
in the singing, accompanying the orchestra, communicating with the
actors in surprising actions and bizarre dialogues. And the actors bicker
clownishly with the musicians.
The Variety Theatre uses the smoke of cigars and cigarettes to join
the atmosphere of the theatre to that of the stage. And because the audience
cooperates in this way with the actors’ fantasy, the action develops
simultaneously on the stage, in the boxes, and in the orchestra. It continues
to the end of the performance, among the battalions of fans, the
honeyed dandies who crowd the stage door to fight over the star; double
final victory; chic dinner and bed. 10
As a lower- class form of popular entertainment, variety theatre provided
ample opportunities for heckling and improvisation on both sides. In its
Futurist iteration, this participation became directly antagonistic, with
performers and audience making direct attacks on one another, frequently
culminating in riot. Some of the techniques suggested to provoke conflict
can be found in the variety theatre manifesto: spreading ‘a powerful glue
on some of the seats, so that the male or female spectator will stay glued
down and make everyone laugh’, selling ‘the same ticket to ten people: traffic
jam, bickering and wrangling’, offering ‘free tickets to gentlemen or
ladies who are notoriously unbalanced, irritable, or eccentric and likely to
provoke uproars with obscene gestures, pinching women, or other freakishness’,
and sprinkling ‘the seats with dust to make people itch and
sneeze’. 11 However infantile these gestures appear, they seem minor
compared with the insults hurled back at the artists, including a member of
the audience at the Teatro Verdi, Florence, on 12 December 1913, who
gave Marinetti a pistol and invited him to commit suicide on stage. 12
Rather than viewing these gestures as displaying an anti- audience attitude
(as Michael Kirby and many others have suggested), we should
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