Theatre in the City of the Future: Construction and Co-creation

Abstract

Early Soviet art of the 1920s and the first half of the 1930s represented a wide range of experiments that affected all ar tistic spheres. This article exam ines how the image of a new the atre was formed in the first post-revolutionary decade as a so cial practice, a political phenom enon, and an element of the urban landscape. A new idea of what the atre is, and what it should be, was formulated by Proletkult theo rists, including Anatoly Lunacharsky and Alexander Bogdanov, as well as the author of the book “Creative Theater”, Platon Kerzhentsev, who suggested that “a new theatre is being cre ated by a commune, a city, a vil lage, a quarter, a factory, a fac tory village, a Soviet, the mass itself.” Kerzhentsev proposed the concept of “neighborhood the aters”, created by neighbors in a proletarian quarter, factory vil lage, etc. This concept is juxta posed in the article with the mod ern concept of urbanism — the idea of participatory design in urban planning and decision-making. The concept of “heterotopia”, intro duced by Michel Foucault to de scribe places that have the prop erties of a transitional space, is also analyzed. According to Foucault, urban spaces have the most intensely expressed signs of heterotopia: among them cemeter ies, museums, prisons, and the atres. He concluded that a new type of theatre, created in an era of radical transition from one type of political community to an other, was a transgressive phenom enon in organizational, discur sive, and spatial senses. The same can be said about the new type of urban development proposed by ide ologists and architects in the early 1920s.