ARTIFICIAL HELLS

artificial hells
rehearsals involving mere hundreds – led to slow performances: ‘the unexpected
need to stagger exits and entrances created long periods of dead air,
to the point that the performance lasted a full six hours’. 64 Moreover, the
repetitive nature of the plots – endless uprisings and rebellions – needed
more variation to succeed artistically, but this could not be done without
jeopardising historical accuracy and a consistent ideological message. As
von Geldern notes, ‘each revolt was a swirling mass of bodies – no leader
could stand out in their midst; and each revolt was equally unorganised as
it stormed the staircase’. 65
The culmination of the 1920 spectacles, and arguably the most successful
artistically, was The Storming of the Winter Palace, held on 7 November to
celebrate the third anniversary of the Revolution. Directed by Nikolai
Evreinov, the re- enactment involved over 8,000 participants and over
100,000 spectators who were assembled into two groups in the centre of
Uritzky Square. It focused on a single event – the Bolshevik- led Red Guards
leading an assault on the Winter Palace – and therefore lacked the Leninist
historicism of the preceding spectacles; from a theatrical point of view, this
also meant that it was more concise and negotiable (the event lasted an hour
and a quarter). The proceedings began at 10 p.m. and the action took place
over three areas in front of the Winter Palace, which were floodlit at different
key moments in the action. According to the theatre historian František
Deák, the direction was very effective and much better organised than the
actual storming of the Winter Palace, which had been full of confusion. 66
Three stages appeared simultaneously – two conventional ones (representing
the ‘red’ and ‘white’ armies respectively), and a ‘real, historical stage’
(the Winter Palace itself) – but only one was lit at any given time, to focus
viewers’ attention. 67 Richard Stites has observed how the organisational
model of these colossal events was wholly military, with performers grouped
into units of ten and receiving instructions through a chain of directorial
command: ‘actors were divided into platoons whose leaders were rehearsed
by directors according to a detailed score or battle plan and deployed by the
use of military signals and field telephones’. 68 As such, the re- enactment was
highly directed and seemed to aim at producing a screen memory, improving
the original events and allowing a secondary incident in the Revolution
to play a leading part in the collective imaginary, even for those who had
participated in the original events. Evreinov reportedly
went as far as to look for the actual participants in the event and used
them in the performance. This was very much in agreement with his
theories of the theatricality of life and of a theatre of memory in which
the past (the mental spectacle) is changed into the present – the spectacle
of live action – by a full re- creation of the circumstances pertaining to
the actual event as it took place in reality. 69
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