Performances both create and reveal communities. They link spectators, authors, and performers. And they were essential to the Soviet project of building unity in a war-torn, ravaged, and divided land. Theatre—in the broadest sense—was thus given high priority in the Soviet Union, even in the most difficult times. “No matter what happens in Russia, the theatres go on,” Louise Bryant insisted while reporting on the revolution. “There can be war and blockade and counter-revolution and cholera and famine but the theatres are as steady and as brilliant as the stars.”1
“No other country has developed a theatre so new and strong, so life-centered and so unified, yet so varied in human interest as that of Soviet Russia,” British theatre critic Huntley Carter proclaimed in 1924. “This theatre expresses more clearly and more forcibly than any other popular institution in Russia the Russian state of mind and its present amazing revolutionary exaltation, as we might say, and its efforts to create a new culture, new human relations, new conditions of life, new crystallization of labour and thought.”2
Beyond scripted events presented on stage, the Soviet Union itself was a living theatre, showcasing the drama of everyday life in a new society. Noting the nearly constant stream of “demonstrations, parades, pageants, [and] festivals,” filling the air with “banners and festoons and cries,” Carter suggested that “in such unending excitement and uplift the new population have expressed themselves in that dramatic form which is innate in human beings, and is unique in the history of the human race.”3
Performances are acts, “the many practices and events—dance, theatre, ritual, political rallies, funerals—that involve theatrical, rehearsed, or conventional/event appropriate behaviors,” but lives are also performances. The concept of performance allows us to look at individuals as “social actors” who both respond to and shape social expectations and norms in specific ways. One example of this is gender, which is something performed, an identity “instituted through a stylized repetition of acts.”4 Women act in accordance with—or in opposition to—popular expectations, in varying social contexts, of what women are supposed to be like. For women unsatisfied with their lives in the United States, the Soviet Union, ostensibly a new society, forging new men and new women, offered an ideal context for trying on, embodying, expressing, and creating new behaviors and identities.
In the first half of the twentieth century, understandings of the relationship between expressive movement and the self were especially clear in dance. Two theorists in particular, François Delsarte and Émile Jacques Dalcroze, influenced modern dance pioneers in the United States, including Isadora Duncan, as well as the major directors and actors in Russia and the Soviet Union. Delsarte helped popularize the idea that humans communicate otherwise inexpressible elements of the self and the emotions through bodily movement and gesture. He created a complex lexicon of gestures, each of which corresponded to a particular psychological state. By this logic, dancers, actors, and other performers could use bodily movements to express their true inner selves. Audiences, in turn, could be transformed simply by intently watching these powerful movements. In Russia, Prince Sergei Volkonsky, former director of the Imperial Theatre, adapted elements of Delsarte’s work along with Dalcroze’s rhythmic gymnastics (known as eurhythmics) to create a synthetic system that influenced physical culture as well as acting, dance, and film theory.5
Russia had a reputation for excellence in the performing arts prior to 1917, a reputation that continued into the Bolshevik era. The acting troupe of Paul Orlenev and Alla Nazimova toured the United States in 1905 (with the assistance of Emma Goldman). Despite the fact that most Americans could not understand the dialogue, critics praised the actors’ “fervor and realism.” One commentator noted “a supple intense effect which wholly lacks the more exaggerated methods of our theatre.” Nazimova offered American audiences their first taste of Konstantin Stanislavsky’s technique of “method” acting, “a type of psychologized acting that was more nuanced and more based on inner life than was customary in the west.” The troupe also appealed to American cultural rebels who appreciated Orlenev’s condemnations of American theatre’s commercialism. The Moscow Art Theatre’s 1923 tour of the United States elicited praises from nearly all quarters, without regard to politics; indeed, Stanislavsky had a singular impact on American theatre, directly inspiring the radical Group Theatre and its offshoot, the Actors Studio, which became the most influential acting school in America.6
Similarly, American ballet had been a coarse and trivial affair compared to the high art of Russian ballet. Three major Russian influences changed that: Anna Pavlova, who toured the United States in 1910, Serge Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes, who toured the United States in 1916–1917, and Michel Fokine, who immigrated to the United States after the Bolshevik revolution.7
The revolution only strengthened American admiration for Russian theatre and, increasingly, film, which was hailed as groundbreaking, innovative, and revolutionary, both aesthetically and politically. Russian films were regularly shown in US art-house cinemas between the mid-1920s and the mid-1930s, and they influenced audiences and experimental filmmakers alike. Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, released in the United States in 1926, stunned audiences with its innovative use of montage; and the Russian practice of factography in documentary, which aims to produce not simply an aura of realism but social action, deeply affected US documentarians.8
Because Soviet films were being shown in the United States but Soviet theatrical productions, for the most part, were not, many visitors to the Soviet Union spent a lot of time attending live performances. Supporters of the revolution extrapolated from Russia’s varied, rich, and often innovative theatre—from nonprofessional workers’ theatre to Vsevolod Meyerhold’s “biomechanical” technique and unconventional staging—to infuse the entire revolutionary program with possibility. “Biomechanics,” which had implications for all forms of performance, involved a complex system of exercises designed to allow the actor “to communicate with the audience by the most dynamic and visually powerful means.” Within a Marxist-Leninist framework, the logical conclusion from the belief that particular physical movements could generate desired emotional states was that performance could, and should, serve as a key tool for social advancement, not simply entertainment. The “new person” could be imagined, enacted, and modeled through performance.9
US theatre director Hallie Flanagan, who visited the Soviet Union in 1927 and 1930, wound up adapting Russian forms when she later developed the signature genre of the Federal Theatre Project, the “Living Newspaper.” But Flanagan was almost as excited about Soviet audiences as she was about Soviet theatre techniques. Of one crowd she noted, “It is full blooded, vigorous, coarse, rough, careless in dress and manner, laughing, jostling, talking, shouting approval or disapproval. . . . It is impossible to tell where audience leaves off and drama begins.” Photographer Margaret Bourke-White, five years later, was struck by the attentiveness of Soviet audiences as well as their working-class character. At the opera she sat among “a press operator, her head in a red kerchief; a plasterer, his clothes dusted with lime; a loom tender in a yellow blouse, her only ornament a red rose at her waist; tow-headed machinists in work-worn garments . . . all are absorbed in the opera.”10 While the Soviet government had created a context for both professional and amateur theatre to thrive, the mass of Soviet citizens collectively represented an ideal audience, more eager to authentically experience rather than to put on airs, more deeply invested in the drama of life unfolding around them than in the selfish task of pursuing individual gain at the expense of one’s peers.
Whether as journalists, or as dancers or actors onstage or on-screen, or as participants amid the rush of new life on streets, in factories, and elsewhere, American women eagerly traveled to Russia to explore new identities and possibilities through performance and to witness the drama of revolution.