Thread by @ooana

More on Meyerhold and the tragic lure of promised utopia that too many fall for. As artists we must remind each other of these facts even if those who teach and guide or inspire us don’t. We owe it to those who came before us. And to those who have tried.

Some quotes from another article and commentary. allarts.org/2020/02/peter-… “Theatre is a very dangerous weapon,” once wrote Russian playwright Vsevolod Meyerhold. This phrase, penned by the director in the 1920s, reverberates through Peter Brook’s recent play, “Why?,”...

“Why did Meyerhold once declare the theatre a “dangerous weapon”? What was so dangerous about it? The twentieth century provides numerous examples of the most gifted artists being seduced by regimes that promised heaven on earth...

It is difficult to imagine the fascist ideas of the Third Reich without Leni Riefenstahl, or Stalin’s socialism without the talented poets, composers, and actors, who gave inspiration to the red idea. Without those artists, millions would not have followed.”Are you taken aback?

We’ve all heard criticism and attribution for the atrocities that have filled the last century promising one form of social progress or another placed on politicians, intellectuals, journalists. We don’t hear or discuss this. But we can feel it. Artists, we are discouraged

from utterances about a dread that fills us when we sense something familiar and dangerous promising something quite different; or else. And can you blame us? In many ways we have McCarthy to thank for that. His universal decry against anyone who fit the bill also created, and

the irony isn’t lost here, the room for the fears and struggles many of us feel now; our anger when an artist is chastised for how she thinks or what she says is misconstrued under a false pretense of “it’s whats best for everyone.” We know what this is. We know it because even

if the realities of what has time and time again been the most horrendous and violent destroyer of the thing we love so much and the too often the people who inspire us, is all to easy to replace with a “but how about this?” In America this is especially true. We have a strange

relationship with our Puritan history that runs through so many things it’s sometimes hard to even distinguish it, sometimes we mislabel it. We are a complex and very young country. But we are also very good at packaging and marketing and it’s true that sometimes we realize,

often far faster than we give ourselves credit, how bad an idea something that was culturally embraced was. We need to do that again. And we need to talk about it and create art that does too. Or...we will keep being meek to the very thing that is capable of destroying us.

We’re lucky. As artists we know very little outside our own way and maybe insecurity can destroy us. We even have the benefit of believing we can and should leave something behind that matters a lot more than we do. We also know and see how easily not only the artist but also the

work can go from adored, to all but dead. Even dead. Or worse. Forcibly forgotten. We now live in a time where such a thing is being touted as simply the will of the people. Oh really? Which people. Who declared them to collectively know anyone’s will but their own?

“A mediocre critic is more dangerous than a mediocre writer” wrote Eugene Ionesco.
He lived during a time that showed the power art can have when it unshackles itself from politics. Meyerhold said this was dangerous. Did you know his name?

There is a reason you may not have. A reason that should feel a little eerily familiar. “Meyerhold was a symbolic figure of the avant-garde, and he also became a symbolic sacrificial lamb of what we might call the theatricalization of evil...

In 1923, he staged “The Earth in Turmoil” and dedicated that production to the Red Army and its heroic leader Leon Trotsky. Trotsky’s own assassination by ice pick in Mexico occurred just a few months after Meyerhold’s execution in Moscow

and was staged in the same style of bloody political theatre practiced by Stalin. It isnt impossible to imagine that Meyerhold’s dedication to Trotsky may have triggered the twisted mind of the paranoid dictator,spurring his invention of an atrocious death for the stage director.

In the mid-1930s, the public political trials began in Russia. The proceedings took place in the Hall of Columns in Moscow’s House of Unions. Everything was planned and rehearsed: “the enemies of the people” were first tortured and then rejuvenated,

their bruises covered up by make-up, before they were brought into the Hall of Columns. There, they all would admit their “crimes” and publicly repent.

Leading actors and writers,even foreign ones, were invited to be in the audience to observe the proceedings, not unlike the opening night of a show. Around this time, the title of “People’s Artist of the Soviet Union” was established, a parallel to Nazi Germany’s “State Artist.””

How many times have we heard and seen people with whom we have placed our trust say that only with repentance will groups be (possibly) forgiven? How often are those apologies seen as inadequate? In the last year? 6 months? 2 months? 1 month?

How often are we told this is simply actions having consequences? The performative hasn’t been kept behind any curtain. We are even encouraged to show how well we are listening and learning. We declare shunning simply Democratic.

“Peter Brook’s father was a member of the Menshevik party, but the family managed to leave the Russian Empire just before the Revolution. Fate protected this son of immigrants from the lure of the communist utopia. Unlike Meyerhold, Brook never had to denounce his “-isms”

he was not driven to self-flagellation in front of his actors. His arms were never broken, nor he did he have to drink his own urine, as Meyerhold described in his letters from prison to Prime Minister Molotov.”
.

So perhaps being told everything is political is only true to the political. And what of the work that is argued should be erased and forgotten; the work deemed problematic. The work not befitting the critics’ decries?

This article describes a photo Leo on record in Moscow. This too feels a little unnerving, “After Meyerhold’s death, to erase any memory of him, this historic photograph was doctored: Knipper “opened” her parasol just a bit, and for many years, Meyerhold disappeared from view.”