This is crash Course Theater and today futurism so bright the manifesto's continue.

So does the grudge match between realism and new reforms, which argue that if you really want to show how weird in visceral and terrifying contemporary life is a bourgeois family, arguing in a living room just doesn't cut it.

This time the argument gets dangerous.

We'll look at Futurism.

Ah, multiple manifesto having Italian and later Russian movement got going in the early decades of the 20th century.

And then we'll stay in Russia.

Toe hang out with the Constructivist director, the several odd mayor hold who was Stanislavsky opponent.

An ultimate inheritor.

Lights up Futurism is an Italian movement that got going in France in 1909 Filippo Tomaso Marinette.

He published a manifesto in the front page of the newspaper Le Figaro.

Nice placement.

The manifesto called for a form of art that would be as fast, exciting, mechanical and macho as a race car.

Marinette, he later named this idea.

Auto Mobile is, um art, he wrote, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, injustice.

He called for a form that would sing the love of danger.

The habit of energy and rash nous and okay, I mean, that maybe sounds kind of fun.

But Marinette, he also called for an art that glorifies war.

The world's only hygiene.

Militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom.

Bring Er's beautiful ideas worth dying for and scorn for woman, he wrote.

We will destroy the museums.

Libraries, academies of every kind will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.

Basically, as the name implies, Futurism wanted a total break from the past.

But it's probably also important to note that Marinette E.

Also co wrote the original Italian Fascist Manifesto and founded the Futurist Political Party, which would later be subsumed into Mussolini's political party.

So, yeah, that total break with the past has really different theoretical underpinnings in comparison to say, Donna, which was kind of about, you know, pulling pieces of paper out of a hat.

Futurism was the rare art movement that embraced war, and a lot of futurist artists got excited about Mussolini.

When he showed up, Futurism even became the house style of Italian fascism.

Now maybe you're thinking un cool.

Well, Marinette, he doesn't care, he writes.

You have objections.

Enough!

Enough.

We know them.

We've understood.

But who cares?

We don't want to understand.

Whoa!

Oh, to anyone who says those infamous words to us again, Marinette, he would fit right in on Twitter.

So what was futurist theater like?

It definitely wasn't realistic.

Mayor Neddy vented his discussed with both historical reconstruction pastiche or plagiarism and photographic reproduction of our daily life.

Futurists said goodbye, toe all of that.

The first futurist play was poopies, electrics or Electric dolls, a play about a bourgeois couple and there look a like robots.

Marinette.

He recited his manifesto in the middle of it.

The audience hated it, really hated it.

During the second act, the play included a bunch of gross digestion noises they pretty much rioted.

Futurists liked the music hall and the variety theater to Marinette.

He wrote that the authors, actors and techniques of the Variety theatre had only one reason for existing and triumphing incessantly to invent new elements.

Off astonishment, they produced variety evenings called a Sarah.

It's kind of like Dada, but less playful.

These evenings had music and poetry and surprise surprise the reading of more manifestos in Futurism.

The manifesto was also a form of art.

There were plays to called Sin Tae Z.

The important thing to know about sent A Z is that they were short and they were fast.

There's one called Detonation, and its main character is a bullet, like an actual bullet fired from an actual gun.

No guy in a bullet costume, just a guy with a firearm with a bullet in it.

Marinate.

His idea was to take conventional plays like a fellow and shrink them down into playlets that were one minute long.

Envy, handkerchief, adultery, strangling, wow, efficient Marinette.

He was definitely against psychological realism and instead promoted what he called fiscal Folio a crazy kind of body movement.

The other important thing about futurist theater was that the audience was supposed to get in on the action, but not voluntarily or happily.

To get Spectators going, Marinette E.

Had some ideas spread a powerful glue on some of the seats he wrote, so that the male or female spectator will stay glued down and make everyone laugh.

Sell the same ticket to 10 people.

Traffic jam, bickering and wrangling offer free tickets to gentlemen or ladies who are notoriously unbalanced, irritable or eccentric and likely to provoke uproars with obscene gestures, pinching women or other freakishness.

Sprinkle the seats with dust to make people rich and a sneeze, et cetera.

Marinette e was a bad person.

Futurism also took off in Russia, though it had a much different feel there more literary, more philosophical.

Still, Russian futurism also wanted a complete break with the past and embrace of modernity.

No fascism to speak of.

Here, though Russian futurism drew much more from communism and the Soviet state Cube Horseshoe Theory comments here.

In a slap in the face of public taste, a 1912 manifesto written in part by the playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky, the Russian futurist said that we should throw Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, et cetera, et cetera.

Overboard from the ship of modernity, Majkowski was also against the slaughter of World War I know.

So that's a nice change of pace.

Russian futurists wanted new words and new forms, and they didn't mind if the audience booed them for it.

The most fervent years of Russian futurism were before the Russian Revolution, but its most famous theater performance happened after when avant garde theater and avant garde politics had a brief honeymoon.

Help us out probable in 1917 during the October revolution, which actually happened in November, a group of Bolsheviks took over the Winter Palace, where the provisional government was meeting.

Originally, the pilots was defended by 3000 soldiers, but most of the soldiers skedaddled when the Bolsheviks arrived, so it wasn't exactly a pitched battle.

Three years later, in 1920 the director Nikolai Every Enough created a play about it.

The storming of the Winter Palace, which was an all night show staged on site in front of 100,000 Spectators.

It included 2500 performers, including the entire class of the Imperial Ballet, as well as a bunch of tanks and armored cars.

This wasn't really a reenactment, or it was a reenactment, Bolshevik kind of way.

It ignored most of the details of the real event, like the fact that it had actually happened during the day, and that there was almost no opposition actors playing.

The workers gathered on a red stage to the left, and actors playing the provisional government assembled on a white stage to the right.

Then the actors playing the workers swarmed the white stage, chanting Lennon, Lennon!

There was a car chase on shadow plays in the windows of the palace.

Performance ended with a cannonball being fired from a ship and then a bunch of books for all thanks that bubble.

What's neat about this performance is that it's one of the first we've talked about that was captured on film.

Obviously, this is longer than most futurist performances, but it's reminiscent of Futurism is total break with the past embrace of modern technology, modern weaponry and revolutionary politics, use of multimedia and multiple focus and interest in spectacle and astonishment over psychology.

Futurism kept going for a couple more decades in Italy, but it was the preferred aesthetic of the fascist regime, not a rebellious countercultural style on surprisingly young artists were way less into it after World War.

Meanwhile, Stalin pretty much shut down futurism in Russia.

He preferred propaganda that glorified the present and his regime toe dreamy glimpses of future utopia.

But we can still feel futurism influence in theater today in multimedia performance, multi focal performance works that mix actors and audience together and works that veer away from psychology and logic.

Now we've talked about manifesto and playwrights, but before we wrap up for today.

We should talk about a famous director and producer from the period of several odd mayor hold who on Lee took from Futurism what he needed and nothing more.

Mayor Hold was born in 18 74.

He was a law student and accomplished violinist who fell in love with the theater.

Eventually joining Stanislavski is Moscow Art Theater.

In the famous production of The Seagull Mayor, Hold played Constantine, the young writer who keeps telling everyone We need new forms, and Mayor Hold himself believed that, too.

He and Stanislavsky clashed often.

Stanislavsky wanted realism, and Mayor Hold wanted a theater that was unashamedly theatrical and dreamlike.

Mayor Hold left the company after four years mailed, went on to direct for the Imperial Theaters, And that's where he started to pioneer new trends in staging like eliminating curtains and backdrops and leaving the house lights on throughout the show.

Like the Futurists, he loved the fairground and the variety theater, and he incorporated elements of circus and commedia dell'arte into his productions.

But he wasn't a fan of the Italian futurists.

When Mayor and Eddie came to Russia, Mayor Hold wrote that his visit reinforced the anarchy that was an unhappy tradition of the Italian theater mayor.

Hold it didn't dig the wild, uncontrolled, deliberately offending the audience style.

He believed that without self restraint, there is no craftsmanship.

But restraint didn't mean realism or naturalism.

In his essay on the fairground booth, he wrote, When Man appeared on stage, why did he submit blindly to the director who wanted to transform the actor into a puppet of the naturalistic school?

The actor of Today will not understand that the duty of the comedian and the mime is to transport the spectator to a world of make belief.

He believed that the truth of life would not be found in realistic surfaces, but beneath them.

Onley theater at its most theatrical, fantastical and acrobatic could help an audience understand it.

He emphasized the primacy of the director rather than the play writing Ah, play is simply the excuse for the revelation of its theme on the level at which that revelation may appear vital.

Today, Mayor Hold is also famous for pioneering a new method of actor training that he called biomechanics.

Biomechanics has been linked to ideas like Ford is, um, and Taylor is, um that were all about how to make the worker more efficient.

But in aesthetic terms, we can link it to Constructivism, another modern art ism.

In keeping with early Russian revolutionary goals, Constructivism glorified industrialization and mechanisation no expressionist anxieties at all, transforming theater into a meaning factory.

Constructivist stage designs, for example, look kind of like theatrical assembly lines covered in treadmills and windmills.

Initially, mayor Hold collaborated with the Bolsheviks and was briefly an official of the theater division before the government pushed drama in a more conservative direction, Mayor Hold founded his own theater and continued to produce plays.

But socialist realism, the favorite style of Soviet Russia was never really his thing.

He was accused of bourgeois formalism and in 1938 to the government liquidated his theater.

The pitiful and wretched thing called socialist realism had nothing in common with art, Mayor Hold is reported to have said, In Hunting of formalism, you have eliminated art that didn't go over well.

He was arrested, tortured and then secretly killed by firing squad in exploring theater and modernism.

We've seen a lot of conflict and a lot of riots, but this is one of the first examples in which aesthetic choices can actually get you killed.

No jokes about that.

Next time we'll be heading to America for a look at some mid century modern Sze Eugene O'Neill and Gertrude Stein.

Until then, the curtain is a curtain is a curtain is a curtain, unless it's not.

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