tretyakov theatre of attractions

The Theater of AttractionsAuthor(s): Sergei Tret'iakov and Kristin RombergReviewed work(s):Source: October, Vol. 118, Soviet Factography (Fall, 2006), pp. 19-26Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40368440 .Accessed: 29/12/2012 07:24

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The Theater of Attractions*

SERGEI TRET'IAKOV

Although the "attraction" achieved its fame as a component of Sergei Eisensteinfs cinematic montage practice, it should not be forgotten that its origins lie in the collaborative theater work ofEisenstein and Tret'iakov from 1923 L1 Influenced by the reflexology of Ivan Pavlov and the biomechanical labor science ofAleksei Gastev, the two proposed the theory of the attraction in an attempt to establish rational norms for evaluating the affective content of the theatrical event. As Eisenstein would later state, the attraction was a "unit for measur- ing the force of art." The basic idea of an aesthetic action that stimulates the organism of the spectator was not in and of itself a noteworthy innovation at the time; in fact, the Russian art journals of the day were flooded with articles focused on advancing the field of research that Mayakovsky designated as "physiological criticism,

" a discipline whose object of study was the art work's use-value as an instrument to organize the neural responses of the spectator? Rather, Tret'iakov fs particular contribution in "The Theater of Attractions" was to mobilize these experiments with the psychophysiology of spectatorial processes for the project of dismantling aesthetic illusion tout court.

If conventional theater addressed the audience as an abstract and universalized subject, the theater of attractions stipulated that the productions must be tailored according to the variable ideological and physical composition of different audiences. And if narrative theater contained the intrigue within the stage's visual proscenium, the actor in the theater

* "Teatr attraktsionov," Oktiabr' mysli, no. 1 (1924), pp. 53-57. Translator Kristin Romberg is grate- ful to Dmitri Gutov and Aleksei Penzin for clarifying aspects of the Russian text, and to Devin Fore for editorial advice. 1. In 1923 and 1924 Tret'iakov worked closely with Eisenstein in the First Worker's Theater of the Moscow Proletkul't, where together they produced the first plays designated as montages of attractions: an adaptation of Ostrovskii's Even a Wise Man Stumbles and two plays by Tret'iakov, Are You Listening, Moscow? and Gasmasks. Their close collaboration would, moreover, continue after Eisenstein left the theater to work as a filmmaker. Eisenstein discusses the attraction in "The Montage of Attractions" (1923) and the "Montage of Film Attractions" (1924), both of which are translated in Writings 1922-1934, vol. 1 of 5. M. Eisenstein: Selected Works, ed. and trans. Richard Taylor (London: BFI, 1988). 2. Between 1923 and 1925, numerous articles that appeared in Lef, Zhizn iskusstva, and Sovetskoe iskusstvo proposed a variety of techniques for quantifying and standardizing the reactions of the spectator in the theater and cinema.

OCTOBER 118, Fall 2006, pp. 19-26. 2006 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.


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of attractions faced the spectator as a physical presence in the auditorium. The theater of attractions focused attention not on the spectacle but on the audience as a concrete and tangi- ble entity to be affected. For this reason Tret'iakov proposed that the theater of attractions could be likened to a surgical theater whose object was the spectator, although he insisted that this patient must be one who is starkly sober: he must be operated upon without anesthesia, without the haze of aesthetic semblance or the prophylaxis of representation? The spectator must be made aware of the fact that his own body was the object of this theatrical procedure. By con- cretizing the audience and incorporating this embodied subject as an element of the performance, the theater of attractions breached the epistemological barrier that created the spectacle's illusion. It thereby disabled a contemplative mode of aesthetic consumption.

The evolution of this theatrical experiment culminated with Tret'iakov's 1926 1 Want a Baby.4 Continuing to eschew densely plotted narrative forms, Tret'iakov designed this final "montage of attractions'* to be constantly interrupted by discussions and seminars on various topics germane to the play 's subject matter, eugenics, and even concluded by inviting the audience to come on stage and view an actual exhibition of genetically "exemplary

" children. In the process, it perforated the score of the play, the source of its integrity as an autonomous art object. In the last montage of attractions, then, the spectator steps into an open-ended work. So while theater critics speculated about various methods for acquiring audience feedback - questionnaires, hidden cameras, etc.5 - TreViakov built this feedback mechanism into the text of the play itself Perhaps we could thus characterize I Want a Baby as a precursor to the happening; or perhaps a closer relative, both genealogically and sociopolitically, would be Bertolt Brecht's Great Pedagogy. In either case, the director of I Want a Baby, Vsevolod Meyerhold, had clearly drawn the logical conclusion when he insisted that the publicity for the play should not announce "first, second, and third 'show' /spektakl'7, but first, second, and third 'discussion. "'6

The recent history of Russian theater has shown close parallels with other forms of art, particularly literature and painting. Once subjective impressionism and symbolist stylization had done away with any sense of reality in art, once art had withdrawn beyond the boundaries of reality into a realm of illusion where "there abides not sickness, nor sadness, and especially no class war," there came a period

3. Sergei Tret'iakov, "Rabochii teatr," Oktiabr' mysli, nos. 5-6 (1924), p. 56. 4. While the montage of attractions would live on in Eisenstein's film work, it nevertheless continued in its cinematic afterlife to be a device that was intrinsically theatrical. Thus Annette Michelson has suggested that even Eisenstein's film work belonged to a "general critique of representation effected through theater." See Michelson 's "Introduction," in Kino-Eye: The Writings ofDziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 1. 5. See, for example, M. Zagorskii, "Kak reagiruet zritel'?," Lef, no. 6 (1924), pp. 141-53; and A. P. Borodin, "O razlichnykh priemakh izucheniia teatral'nogo zritelia," Sovetskoe iskusstvo, no. 9 (1925), pp. 30-37. 6. Vsevolod Meyerhold quoted in a stenographic record from a meeting on the production of / Want a Baby, reprinted in Sovremennaia dramaturgiia, no. 2 (1982), p. 242.


The Theater of Attractions 21

when art turned to explore a space that had been forfeited to a set of utilitarian industries. It is utterly characteristic of this return that it did not begin by subordi- nating the object to a clearly defined, socially useful job; it did not follow a specific material form's clear-cut social function (thus, aestheticism, psychologism, and the discrepancy between the aesthetic tradition and economics remained firmly in place).7 This return took the opposite approach: it began by becoming conscious of the material and formal elements of the art at hand. In the way that they studied their art's materials, the principles of its support structure and combination [skrepy i kombinirovaniia] , Cubism and nonobjectivity (with their problem of faktura), and transrationalism and the theory of the self-made word in literature, correspond to the theory of biomechanics in theater. The theory of biomechanics offers an organically based and calculated type of movement to replace the decaying wood of the MKhAT's autohypnosis, the aesthetic plastic pretensions of the Kamernyi Theater, and the Malyi Theater's muscular narcosis.8 It provides for expressive movement the same scientific foundation that the Scientific Organization of Labor and scientifically based sport brought to labor movement.

Yet I must emphasize that despite the tremendous importance of biomechanics as a new and purposive method of constructing movement, it far from resolves the problem of theater as an instrument for class influence. This is why two essen- tially incompatible functions for the new theater have appeared at different times in the press (indeed, at times simultaneously, for example, in my own work while I was developing my theses on Meyerhold's theater). On the one hand, we see an agit- or advert-theater proposed, and on the other, a theater of illustrative demonstration and the presentation of everyday life. Completely overlooked is the fact that the spectacle that acts upon the emotions and that which addresses the intel- lect are, according to their own devices, absolute opposites.

Historically, the path from form to social prescription, rather than the reverse, turned out to be the right one. Those who took the opposite route, ignoring the material and its properties in an effort to build the things necessary for the current plan, quickly fell into old aesthetic molds and produced work that was not only use- less, but also actually harmful (e.g., the Forge's prolet-poetry, the painting of AKhKhR,9 MGSPS's [Moscow City Council of Trade Unions] theater, and even the Theater of the Revolution, to the extent that it remained unaffected by Meyerhold's work, or where Meyerhold ran up against the obviously unsuitable material of an obsolete type of acting that could not be adapted).

7. This may be explained by the fact that the idea of introducing art into industry arose from the very group of artists who had broken away from easel painting and stood as far removed from the questions of the reorganization of the socioeconomic base as economists and politicians from questions of art. [-S. T.] 8. Tret'iakov refers to the three most prominent theaters in Moscow, each known for different styles and acting methods: Stanislavsky's Moscow Art Theater (MKhAT), well known as the cradle of method acting; Tairov's Kamernyi Theater, known at that time for an aestheticized use of European and Asian theatrical traditions like pantomime and commedia; and the Malyi Theater, the oldest and most traditional dramatic theater in Moscow. 9. Presumably Tret'iakov is referring to AKhRR, the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia.


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Of course one must also consider those groups who did work with the material, but who stopped halfway. Unable to apply their knowledge of the material's properties to the day's urgent problems, they squandered their energies on aesthetic knick-knacks, displays of pure self-indulgence, and a shamanism in the service of refined pastimes. Literary transrationalism is one example. With no desire to become a factory or laboratory of exact methods, it moved entirely into handcrafting verbal decoration, the justification of which required the most elabo- rately concocted rationalizations based entirely on psychology.10 In the visual arts, the nonobjectivists took a similar path, contenting themselves with decorating porcelain teacups with squares and other geometrical forms or with converting those teacups into constructions so flat that they ceased to be fit for practical use. In theater, this trend produced an aestheticization of the machine (Foregger's dances) and the self-indulgent theatrical eccentrism that, tainted by the aesthetic idolization of every Americanism, created a sort of American skyscraper exotica (an example is the dying Petersburg FEKS).

Work on stage material - that is, its transformation into a machine that helps make the actor's job as broad and multifaceted as possible - becomes socially justi- fiable only at the point when the machine is not only firing its pistons and sustaining a definite workload, but also carrying out useful work in response to actual problems of the revolutionary day. Without this useful and emphatically utilitarian function, all the achievements of the new theater very easily begin to serve the opposition. The reactionary theatrical front regarded constructivism and eccentrism as a source of "little tricks" [priemchikami] to spice up the performances of theaters of the right front, a dash of "red pepper" to satisfy petty-bourgeois tastes. Needless to say, the majority of theaters, so obviously hostile to the new theater's basic revolutionary tendency, did not have Cuckolds interests in mind when they replaced their pavilions and backdrops with ladders and planks.11 Now, when a production uses these sorts of constructions, it is actually considered a sign of good taste. In Meyerhold's theater, by contrast, Cuckold represented only one phase in the mastery of material, a phase without which the production of The Earth in Turmoil would have been inconceivable.12

10. Even if the transrationalists don't mention it themselves, one can't help but think of the task of creating name-days (for saints). The names that emerge today - for example, Oktiabrina - are made from the same suffixes that in principle also construct names like Evelina, Georgina, Frina, and Irina, and carry the unbearable scent of confectionary phiiistinism, which kills the whole explosive expres- siveness of the name's origin. Tendencies to found name-monuments must be opposed, as must be name-projects, name-tendencies, and names connected to industry. "Rapit" (a type of especially hard steel) is an example of one of these names. [-S. T.] 11. Meyerhold's production of The Magnanimous Cuckold in April 1922 employed Liubov' Popova's Constructivist stage design, which was composed of wooden scaffolding and ladders. 1^. The Earth in Turmoil was also written by Tret'iakov. Meyerhold's 1923 production used a number of contemporary real-life objects, including a car, motorcycles, field telephones, machine guns, a mobile army kitchen, and a combine harvester.



Even in The Earth in Turmoil, the construction is already nothing but a purely auxiliary structure enabling future performances to be staged in any preexisting setting, e.g., the square, the factory, the arsenal, the courtyard (similar to those of the Meyerhold theater's summer tours).

Thus the logical course in the search for the new theater begins by mastering the material properties of theatrical activity on a scientific basis and then proceeds to address the precise social tasks that convert theater into a tool for class action. The theatrical demonstration is replaced by the theatrical commission [prikazom] , by a process of direct work with the audience [priamoi obrabotkoi auditorii]. Indeed, here we have located our next task: to integrate the audience as an element in the performance and to develop methods for calculating the particular effects and emotional charge that theater seeks to provoke in its audience.

The Theater of Attractions is exploring this territory. The director of the Proletkul't Theater, Sergei Eisenstein, considers an attraction to be any calculated pres- sure on the spectator's attention and emotions, any combination of staged elements that is able to focus the emotion of the spectator in the direction that the performance requires. From this point of view, the performance is not at all a demonstration of

Eisenstein and Tret 'iakov s production of Even a Wise Man Stumbles. 1923.


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Rehearsal for Eisenstein 's production of Tret 'iakov 's Gasmasks. 1 924.

events, characters, or plastic combi- nations, more or less true to life. It is a site for the construction of a sequence of theatrical situations that work on an audience according to a given task. The attraction seizes the audience's attention, compresses its emotion, and discharges it. In the end, the performance has delivered the requisite "charging" of the spectator. Of course, Comrade Eisenstein 's work in the First Workers' Theater thus far represents only the first step toward the conscious calculation of theatrical perception. Yet this first step is already significant: first, because it demands that the performance calculate attractions in ac- cordance with a definite audience (otherwise an effect could be falsified or inaccurate); and second, because it converts what was formerly an artistic theatrical demonstration into productive work based upon experiment and calculation.

The attraction is not to be regarded as a new invention in theater. Theater always employed the attraction, but unconsciously. Think of all the particularly affecting parts of a performance, those climactic moments that are intended to provoke applause and ovation, all those dramatic final exits. These are all attractions. But their position in the old theater is secondary and subordinated to the psychological logic of the plot. The Art Theater's chirping cricket is also an attraction. An attraction always requires an estimation of habitual viewer psychology, and then, against this baseline, it can work on the nerves to produce a moment of alarm. In the Theater of Attractions, creating a performance entails first finding the form that most sharply provokes the viewer's emotions (i.e., the attraction). These attractions, then, are deployed in a sequence of mounting intensity, which secures the final discharge of the viewer's emotion in the desired direction (the montage of attractions).

A montage of attractions may either result from mere contiguity or be moti- vated by the plot. The first type of montage shows up in the music hall, the variety show, and the circus program (although there they are directed toward a self- indulgent and aesthetic form of emotion); the second type of performance is composed as a play with a plot. In the production of Even a Wise Man Stumbles, we



find the first type of montage of attractions. Its attractions are above all based on acrobatic tricks and stunts and on parodies of canonical theatrical constructions taken from the circus and the musical. The acrobatic demonstrations provoke audience reflexes that are almost entirely objective [absoliutnye] and that are connected to motor structures that are difficult and unfamiliar for the spectator. The connection between the attractions is provided by the plot, which on the whole plays a very minimal role, serving only to guarantee continuity of attention. It should be noted that several very effective attractions (for example, the balancing act) are linked to the plot in a completely artificial way, through arbitrary motiva- tions (in this case through the words "go out on a limb"). Yet none of the power of this performance relies on the motivating text. Far more crucial is the way that groups of attractions operate as partial agit-tasks. For example, there are attractions of political satire (e.g., Joffre and Curzon), satire of everyday life (in the fourth and fifth acts), topical buffoonery (in the fifth act), and theatrical parody (e.g., the fascist's movements stylized in the mode of the Kamernyi Theater, the re- creations of MKhAT's repertoire parodied by Turusina and Ryzhii, or the series of exits that provoke cries of "Bravo! Just like in the Bol'shoi Theater!"). The performance's effect on the audience is expressed in statements such as "What a shame that I can't control my movements like that," "If only I could do cartwheels," and so on.

This result - these platonic sighs over physical ineptitude that nonetheless remain sighs - demonstrates exactly the same aesthetic that every Ivan Ivanovich carries "in his soul" as he exits a performance of Brand, depressed from all Brand's thrashing about. The advantage in the Theater of Attractions is that people do not leave the performance regretting the absence of personal inner turmoil or the decadent refinement of Chekhovian heroes, but rather their own existing physical shortcomings. Nevertheless, a fact is a fact, and as an attempt to develop the montage of attractions, Wise Man is only of formal, experimental significance. In this regard, Wise Man is just as nonobjective as Cuckold.

The production of Moscow, Do You Hear Me? is somewhat different. This play was created for and adapted to the tasks of the period when the German revolution was unfolding. Its function was the condensation of a victory-directed [pobedoustremiternuiu] revolutionary energy in the masses who would very possibly end up replenishing Germany's armed front, and who in any case would have had to provide active material support [aktivnym tylom] for the revolution. The play was staged on the same principle as Wise Man: no emotional experience on the stage, no psychological or historical veracity, but rather an efficacy in accumulating emotions of class sympathy and class hatred. The performance had to function as a precise tool for accumulating this kind of emotion in the audience. Quantitatively it contained few attractions: the scene with the whip and spit in the first act, the unmasking of the provocateur in the second, the openly staged murder of Kurt in the third, and the portrait of Lenin in the fourth. The director's use of attractions to build an ever-increasing and alarming nervous tension employed


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a variety of techniques: both naturalistic devices (blood, chattering teeth, a rifle shot) and a technique of supercharging emotion through the extensive use of pauses (for some critics this called to mind MKhATs use of pauses). The entire structure of the movement relied on the simplest organic movements, decomposed into their elementary parts and then recomposed into sometimes highly complicated figures (e.g., the murder of the provocateur). This movement - constructed not on the basis of feeling, but just the opposite, on a study of the way that it works in reality - produced the desired effect. Viewers typically remarked that performing a role in this way requires complete habituation. No less interest- ing was their amazement when the same movement was demonstrated in its decomposed form, which clarified the nature of a performance that is constructed on the basis of calculations of the emotional intensity, tempo, and movement of the actor (not to be confused with inspiration or conversion into the character on stage, or with penetration into the character's psyche). This emotional tension is absolutely identical to the efficiency and readiness that is familiar to anyone who has ever executed any sort of work in a serious way.

Preliminary calculation can be said to account for 70 percent of the production's effect. This is not the full 100 percent, because 1) as historical events marched on, the play lost the context for which it was intended; and 2) the audience had nowehere near the homogeneous class composition that is necessary for the Theater of Attractions to calculate and deliver a maximally productive effect.

To summarize in conclusion: Sergei Eisenstein's Theater of Attractions is the latest stage of work on a pro-

ductive theater that is effective in terms of class [klassovo-deistvennogo teatra] and that treats the performance as a series of pressures on the audience's psyche to be brought about by theatrical means. The Theater of Attractions requires an audience with a homogeneous class composition, and it understands this audience as a material that can be worked using a set of established techniques. First taking into account the audience's psyche and the concrete tasks of contemporary social reality, the Theater of Attractions organizes the material of the stage by creating attractions from every means that has an expressive influence on the spectator. It uses every means, because the Theater of Attractions is not a theater with a fin- ished style, but a theater of expedient class action and conscious utilitarian aims.


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Issue Table of ContentsOctober, Vol. 118, Soviet Factography (Fall, 2006), pp. 1-178Front MatterIntroduction [pp. 3-10]Art in the Revolution and the Revolution in Art (Aesthetic Consumption and Production) [pp. 11-18]The Theater of Attractions [pp. 19-26]Our Cinema [pp. 27-44]The New Leo Tolstoy [pp. 45-50]To Be Continued [pp. 51-56]The Biography of the Object [pp. 57-62]The Writer and the Socialist Village [pp. 63-70]From the Photo-Series to Extended Photo-Observation [pp. 71-77]A Writer's Handbook [pp. 78-94]The Operative Word in Soviet Factography [pp. 95-131]The Fact and the Photograph [pp. 132-152]The Revolutionary Archive of A. R. [pp. 153-158]Radical Tourism: Sergei Tret'iakov at the Communist Lighthouse [pp. 159-178]Back Matter

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