NEW DIRECTIONS IN THEATRE General Editor JULIAN HILTON NEW DIRECTIONS IN THEATRE Published titles FEMINISM AND THEATRE Sue-Ellen Case IMPROVISATION IN DRAMA Anthony Frost and Ralph Yarrow NEW DIRECTIONS IN THEATRE Julian Hilton PERFORMANCE Julian Hilton THEATRE AS ACTION Lars Kleberg TRANSPOSING DRAMA Egil Tornquist Forthcoming titles REPRESENTATION AND THE ACTOR Gerry McCarthy SEMIOTICS OF THE DRAMATIC TEXT Susan Melrose Theatre as Action Soviet Russian Avant-Garde Aesthetics LARS KLEBERG Translated from Swedish by Charles Rougle 150th YEAR M MACMILLAN © Lars Kleberg 1980, 1993 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1993 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WIP 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published in Swedish 1980 by Bokfiirlaget PANlNorstedts Stockholm First published in English 1993 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world ISBN 978-0-333-56817-0 ISBN 978-1-349-22867-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-22867-6 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Contents General Editor's Preface Vll Preface IX PART I AVANT-GARDE ART AND THE PROJECT OF CULTURAL REVOLUTION 1 Iconoclasm and Festival 2 2 The Project of Cultural Revolution 8 In search of a cultural policy 8 Culture as collective creativity: the Proletkult 10 The professional cultural revolution: the avant-garde 14 The crisis of 1920-1921 and the defeat of the maximalists 18 'Lenin's view of culture' 21 Production art 23 3 Down with the Fetishes! 27 The modern cult of the statue 27 Statues and the early Soviet government 28 The avant-garde and iconoclasm 30 Tatlin's anti-monument 32 Permanent iconoclasm 34 PART II THEATRE AS ACTION 4 Theatre as Example 38 5 The Semiotics of Theatre 40 Theatrical doctrines and theatrical theory 40 The sign function of the theatre 42 Stage, auditorium, society 44 6 Stage and Auditorium in the Russian Modernist Theatre 50 Three types of theatre 50 v VI Contents The people's theatre before 1917 55 The people's theatre utopia after the October Revolution 58 7 Theatre Constructivism 65 Meyerhold and the rationalisation of theatre 65 Towards biomechanics 67 Action and expressiveness 70 'The factory for the new man' 72 8 The Theatre of Attractions 77 The circus as laboratory 77 From sign to action 82 The theatre as 'processing of the spectator' 84 Theatre at the factory 86 Striking facts 89 9 The Audience as Myth and Reality 93 The crisis of the people's theatre utopia 93 Audience responses: how? who? why? 94 Two concepts of the audience 100 10 The Theatre as an Arena for Discussion 103 The divided audience 103 Biology and society 104 'Love on the operating table' 108 Brecht, Tretyakov, and the instructive theatre 109 11 The Provisional Abdication of Total Theatre 114 POSTSCRIPT: THE AVANT-GARDE AND HISTORY 120 Notes 127 Biographical Notes 147 Index 149 General Editor's Preface In the past ten years, Theatre Studies has experienced remarkable inter national growth, students seeing in its marriage of the practical and the intellectual a creative and rewarding discipline. Some countries are now opening school and degree programmes in Theatre Studies for the first time; others are having to accommodate to the fact that a popular subject attracting large numbers of highly motivated students has to be given greater attention than hitherto. The professional theatre itself is chang ing, as graduates of degree and diploma programmes make their way through the 'fringe' into established theatre companies, film and tele vision. Two changes in attitudes have occurred as a result: first, that the relationship between teachers and practitioners has significantly im proved, not least because many more people now have experience of both; secondly, that the widespread academic suspicion about theatre as a subject for study has at least been squarely faced, if not fully discred ited. Yet there is still much to be done to translate the practical and educational achievements of the past decade into coherent theory, and this series is intended as a contribution to that task. Its contributors are chosen for their combination of professional and didactic skills, and are drawn from a wide range of countries, languages and styles in order to give some impression of the subject in its international perspective. This series offers no single programme or ideology; yet all its authors have in common the sense of being in a period of transition and debate out of which the theory and practice of theatre cannot but emerge in a new form. JULIAN HILTON vii Preface In the debates on 'revolutionary art' or 'cultural revolution' in the 1920s in Soviet Russia, several discourses seem to be intertwined, to run parallel, and even, at times, to. coincide. The same can be said of the concept of the homogeneous and 'representative' auditorium during the period of theatrical modernism. One of the primary tasks of the analysis in the present book has been to distinguish and contrast different con cepts, even at points where they sometimes seem to be using the same words. This has called for a somewhat archaeological approach of recon struction and conjecture. Contemporaries of the period in question per haps found it easier to distinguish between positions which at a historical distance tend to be swallowed up in a single '1920s discourse'. For example, the avant-gardists, the Proletkult activists, and the few Bolshe viks interested' in art were in reality associated with quite different cultural contexts which automatically guaranteed various decodings of their sometimes almost identical phraseology. The reader of today is necessarily obliged to adopt an approach that reactivates these contexts and sharpens such distinctions. If distinguishing and differentiating is the first of the two basic strategies of this study, the second seems to lead in the opposite direc tion. For the sake of conclusive comparisons, the analysis sometimes simplifies, and sometimes deliberately overexposes phenomena of rather different levels (for example, the theatrical practice of naturalist staging and the utopian programme of 'ritual theatre'). In retrospect, some of these typological strictures may appear somewhat 'anatomical', but be cause they are essential to the composition of the book, I have chosen to leave them largely unaltered from the original version. In revising the text for the English edition I have generally tried to avoid superficially 'updating' the frame of reference; my afterthoughts are to be found in the Postscript. Certain passages have been shortened, some new paragraphs added, and the chapter 'The Provisional Abdica tion of Total Theatre' is new. The bibliographic references have been thoroughly revised with a view to the English-speaking reader. Apart from these changes, the central arguments of the book stand as they were formulated fifteen years ago. Re-reading the original 1977 Swedish edition of the book, I have noted (with mixed feelings of satisfaction and disappointment) that the wealth IX x Preface of research on the Russian avant-garde and the Soviet 1920s published in the meantime has not rendered my treatment of the basic issue obso lete: the interrelationship between art and the public, or, in the language of semiotics, the pragmatic aspect of art. Furthermore, what must be considered the new standard work in the field, Konstantin Rudnitsky's strictly inductive survey Russian and Soviet Theatre. Tradition and the Avant-Garde (1988) seems to lend support both to the typology pro posed here and to my strong emphasis on the Wagnerian heritage and the popular mixture of symbolism and communism, aspects which in 1977 were not commonly treated either in Soviet or in Western scholarship. The reservations the book may raise in retrospect probably have to do with its limited scope. The focus on the politicised segment of the avant garde viewed as the centre of Russian cultural life was obviously the choice of a sympathiser - a sympathiser, however, who was more inter ested in analysing the crisis of the movement than in proposing an uncritical reception of it. Thus the book was and still is not an attempt to write the history of the Soviet Russian theatre of the 1920s. Its compo sition is determined by the theme: the self-reflection of a political avant garde art situated, roughly speaking, in a field delimited by the names of V sevolod Meyerhold and Bertolt Brecht. The choice of both subject and method has obvious roots in the perspective of the 1970s, but this is not the only reason my book is out of tune with the current 'about-face' trend in Soviet cultural history, which proposes a general inversion of former established hierarchies and proportions and sometimes ends in little more than a new hagiography: instead of Mayakovsky - Mandelstam; instead of Meyerhold - Tairov; instead of Lenin - Berdyayev; and so on. My aim was and is not to contribute to such new hierarchy-building. If there is today a specific context to which the study of the 1920s transfor mations of certain avant-garde myths relates, it is probably that of the post-modernist debate. * * * In the preface to the first edition of this book I quoted the Swedish critic Ulf Linde, who remarked: 'What you are not able to translate, you haven't really understood.' My friend Charles Rougle's translation of the text is based on a true understanding of the subject, and has certainly provoked me to clarify or revise a number of points. For different reasons - one of them being the geographical distance that now separates us - we have not been able to finish work on the book in the close collaboration in which it was begun.