ARTIFICIAL HELLS

artificial hells
figure is Kerzhentsev, an influential advocate of collective non- professional
theatre. His book The Creative Theatre (1918) was informed by his experiences
of viewing folk and traditional pageants in the US and the UK, and
by Romain Rolland’s The People’s Theatre (1903), an account of French
theatre ‘by and for the people’, covering the period from 1789 to the turn of
the twentieth century. 60 Kerzhentsev saw these as examples of alternatives
to professional theatre and an opportunity for culture to evolve from the
people themselves. He encouraged pageant and mass spectacle as particularly
effective forms of theatre, since both encouraged the use of public
space: ‘Why confine theatre to the proscenium arch when it can have the
freedom of the public square?’ 61 Monumental outdoor spectacles encouraged
mass participation, sublating individualism into visually overpowering
displays of collective presence. These were particularly popular in St
Petersburg, where a series of mass festivals took place over 1919– 20. The
first of these was held for the May Day celebration in 1919, entitled The
Third International (‘a staging of slogans about revolution, the end of
tyrants, the burial of martyrs, and a world of peace’) and was followed by
four no less ideologically driven spectacles during 1920. 62
The first spectacles of the 1920 cycle, The Mystery of Freed Labour (on
May Day) and The Blockade of Russia (on 20 June), involved thousands of
participants. Both were directed from within the action, and attracted audiences
of over 35,000 people in the square. The Mystery of Freed Labour
represented a historical schema that would become the standard feature of
revolutionary festivals, in which the Bolsheviks were heir to a long tradition
of rebellion against illegitimate authority. It was also typical in
presenting a paean to the October Revolution as a way of staking the
Bolshevik claim to leadership of international communism; in other words,
despite its ostensibly internationalist diegesis, mass spectacle also functioned
as a way to assert Russian primacy over other national socialist
groups. The third spectacle of this series, Toward a World Commune, was
held on 19 July 1920 and also adopted a historical structure (the first, second
and third internationals) and vast numbers of performers (4,000 participants
playing to a crowd of 45,000). It featured re- enactments of the French
Revolution, the 1914 war and the triumph of the Red Army. In the words
of Fülöp- Miller, it was an attempt ‘to pass directly from the illusion of
dramatic action to reality: a great part of the town was used as the stage of
the events; real troops appeared, and the “representation of the whole
world” was so far “real” in that it actually consisted of representations of
the international communist party organisations’. 63
James von Geldern usefully highlights some of the artistic problems that
arose in the production of mass spectacles, all of which revolved around a
conflict between artistic and ideological requirements. The principle of
using amateurs meant that the acting was weak, the desire for spontaneity
in fact led to chaotic action, and the use of thousands of bodies – after
58