Exit, pursued by a mob
Theatre, performance and script in the comparative understanding of revolution.
I have just finished a book, which I won't name because I didn’t really like it. Perhaps impressively, whilst set during an incredibly interesting part of history, it managed to be exceedingly boring. This damp squib of a story did, however, remind me of an article I once wrote for a university magazine. I have been struggling, seemingly in perpetuity, to finish writing anything new. So I won’t. I’ll write something I have already written.
I think we always have things to learn from previous revolutions, and the ember of revolutionary sentiment within us needs to be guarded from our generalised malaise. That being said, I feel an intense longing for something new. A new analysis, a new understanding or even just a new story. Should we build on and out of our past? Or start again, to create the greatest show?
[Exit, pursued by a mob]
Revolution is, amongst other things, a performance. It is the playing out of a revolutionary narrative on the public and political stage. The revolutionary script is written, and rewritten. Restaged in a, usually, at least semi-conscious way. Of course, each revolution is different and as such the revolutionary script is always adapted. However, in calling revolution a performance, I am not simply talking of a revolutionary script but of a transformative revolutionary theatre. There are two different concepts I want to get across here. First, the conscious creation and performance of a story, and indeed inhabiting the ‘character’ of the revolutionary. Second, the internally and societally transformative nature of the performative acts of revolution. Revolution as theatre is near universal to all revolutions, but I think it is especially evident in the so called ‘bloodless’ or ‘velvet’ revolutions, which I will come to discuss.
To start with, we should define what we understand as a ‘script’ in the revolutionary context. For Baker and Edelstein, it retains the straightforward literary definition. “A script creates a situation and sets out the manner of its unfolding. It requires the setting of a scene and the characterisation of those acting within it, in relationship to one another and to the situation more broadly construed.” This shouldn’t be taken to mean that this revolutionary script is a “unit idea.” Far from it, for the constantly mutating nature of the script is a key tenet of Baker and Edelstein’s understanding.
Whilst others believe the revolutionary script goes back further, I argue that the American, French and Haitian revolutions are the most important for the first part of this interrogation. Dominica Chang describes the French Revolution as “A series of events and cast of characters eminently worthy of both re-creation and emulation.” In 1840s France, Lamartine's Histoire des Girondins, seemed to be the physical script that the agitated men and women understood themselves as wanting to emulate. Indeed, in both the failed 1848 revolution and the later Bolshevik revolution in Russia1, the period of repression that followed emulated the Terror. Terror should not be understood as a necessary sociologically dictated step in revolution, but because the Jacobin script was consciously emulated, the same phases were recreated. In the case of the Haitian revolution, we see a similar emulation of the American revolutionary script. C.L.R James, in The Black Jacobins, writes that “[The Slaves] had heard of the revolution and had construed it in their own image.” The Haitian revolutionaries understood themselves within the revolutionary canon. Taking the revolutionary script through to its final acts, the first leader of independent Haiti, Jean Jacques Dessalines stepped in to the character ‘Emperor,’ following the example of Napoleon, and declared “I have avenged America.” We can, therefore, quite confidently claim that he situated himself within the wider context of the contemporary revolutions in the Atlantic theatre. The script of the then recent history was restaged in a Haitian context, whilst developing the preeminence of ‘human rights’ which was, in turn, added to this growing script used by future revolutionaries.
I’ll turn now from revolution as script to revolution as theatre, to focus on the ritual theatrical aspects of revolution. Radan Haluzik, in his somewhat anecdotal, but therefore interesting, consideration of the velvet revolutions describes the mass mobilisation of people on the streets as, “Sending nations into ecstasy through the drama of political spectacles.” The people who took to the streets in the revolutions of the late 1980s and early 1990s engaged in, what I take to be, a form of street theatre. Their protest came through singing and great oration to, and with, the large crowds of people that gathered to call for the end of the regimes under which they lived.2 Haluzik understands central Europe from 1988-1989 as a “Carnival of revolution.” It is through this theatrical turn that the people were able to have the largest impact in these velvet revolutions. There are more factors in play in revolutions than we can juggle here, and ever more will no doubt be teased out by historians until history ceases to be our concern anymore. Whilst everyone will have a different opinion on what makes a revolution ultimately ‘successful,’ when we are faced with largely bloodless revolutions- though I will note here that this term is not comfortably used- we have to ask ourselves what caused or inspired the urgency of change?
Central to these revolutions, and therefore their success, is the transformation of individual and collective self perception that came about through these performances. To borrow the words of Barbara Myerhoff, “the performer is permanently changed, transformed, rather than transported from Point A to Point B and back again.” Haluzik extrapolates this to wider society when he says, in the case of the fall of the eastern bloc, “Great political theatre as political ritual is a radical alchemy working with the transmutation of society.” In this frame of analysis, revolutionary theatre is about creating within yourself (and others) the conditions necessary to construct and inhabit the society you are striving for. It is this consciousness raising aspect, believing oneself to be, for example, “Ein Volk,” that is the truly revolutionary aspect of the street movements. In her discussion of ritual performance Myerhoff states that “‘doing is believing’ and members of the new culture perform: to behold themselves, finally becoming what they behold.” In its theatrical elements, I believe this also applies to revolution and revolutionaries and that through these ritualised performances, the revolutionary inhabits the character of the citizen of the societal state they are fighting for. When the downfall of the state is brought about by a hasty, and not altogether clear, press conference (as it was in East Germany), what was the role of the people on the street? I put to you that their mass organisation created political spectacle and through their individual performance they brought about the internal conditions necessary to become citizens of a new state.
Whilst this has been a whistlestop tour, I have aimed to set out two, varied but not disparate, ways of theorising revolution in its theatrical sense. The understanding of revolution as theatre offers a wide framework of analysis to be equipped in comparative revolutionary studies and is, I believe, a useful and convincing conceptualisation of revolution. One could look at genuine pieces of theatre that come out of revolutions, and I do think this has a place here if one wishes to research this further, but the focus of this brief exploration was first, how did revolutionaries understand themselves as taking part in the production of a revolutionary script? And second, how do performative aspects of revolution play a role in the wider overhaul of society and the self? It may seem that the answer to the first question is simply: revolutionaries are aware of the existence of other revolutionaries, but this would be egregiously dismissive of the conscious emulation of revolutionary predecessors. In the revolutions of the second half of the twentieth century, we see revolution as performance really coming into its own. Of course the rise of broadcast television meant that one was literally performing for people around the world, again a place for further research. I think though, that in the collapse of the eighties into the nineties (and the states that followed suit) the consciousness raising aspect of performance, as explained using Myerhoff’s work on ritual performance, is integral to the revolutionary changes found in the central and eastern bloc. This is perhaps especially true in Germany where, in the enduring spirit of the Spice Girls, those great scholars of performance, 2 become 1.
If you have any thoughts, opinions, questions or the like, please do leave a comment, I would love to discuss this further with you.
Sources:
Keith Michael Baker, and Dan Edelstein, Scripting Revolution : a Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions, (California: Stanford University Press, 2015)
Dominica Chang, ‘Reading and repeating the revolutionary script’ in Scripting Revolutions (California: Stanford University Press, 2015)
C.L.R James, The Black Jacobins, (UK: Secker and Warburg, 1938)
Michael J. Dash, ‘The Theatre of the Haitian revolution,’ Small Axe, 9.2, 2005
Radan Haluzík, ‘It Was All a Big Theatre’: Velvet revolutions, ethnic conflicts, and conspiracy theories in Eastern Europe, Diogenes, 62, 2015
Barbara Myerhoff, ‘The transformation of consciousness in ritual performances: some thoughts and questions’ in By Means of Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre and Ritual. ed. by R schechner and W Appell (Cambridge: CUP, 1990)
Interestingly, the forms of address that were common in Russia post revolution, ‘comrade’ and ‘citizen’ were both directly drawing off of French revolutionary terms. The etymology of such terms is a good case study for those looking at how revolutionaries emulate each other.
To temper this point, I would like to make the disclaimer that this wasn’t necessarily always the explicit call, and indeed the ‘rallying cry’ in each nation went through stages of mutation. However for our purposes, all that matters is that they were on the streets calling for change.