Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire

6 Theater: The Professionalization of Performance

a 6 b Theater: The Professionalization of Performance Even before theater activists of the early twentieth century began to see the theater as a mystical conduit to another world, the role of theater on the path to cultural refinement and sophistication was well established in this world. As Russian theater critic Ivan Ivanov declared in 1899: “For us, plays and theatres are what parliamentary affairs and political speeches are for Western Europe.”1 For the Jews of the Russian Empire, who for the most part lacked access to even the few forums of public expression available to the Russian majority, theater was even more than a surrogate parliament; it was a temple of art and the actors its priests. In his post–World War I observations of Eastern European Jews, Arnold Zweig identified two types of Jewish folk artists: the theater and its actors, he wrote, “rest next to the religious service and its representatives, next to the second folk artist, the chazan, the cantor.”2 It is no coincidence that the Yiddish word for stage, bime, is the same word used to denote the synagogue pulpit. The performing arts inWestern Europe became increasingly specialized over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the early modern period, European performance artists were expected to combine oratory with dance, song, and other genres (often as dilettantes), but the advent of modernity and the accompanying culture of celebrity required artists to become virtuosos in a single genre. When modern performances combined genres such as music and dance, they did so simultaneously, as in opera or ballet, rather than serially, as in circus or vaudeville. Although audiences continued to enjoy vaudeville in America, cabaret in Europe, and estrada in Russia, the intellectuals who regarded themselves—and were regarded by others—as the guardians of legitimate culture often decried the failure of both audiences and performers to renounce the dilettantism of variety acts in favor of professional specialization. As Jewish public culture became more institutionalized and professional over the course of the first two decades of the century, performance genres became more independent and differentiated, as well as more accepted across the community . Nevertheless, the distinction between professional and ­ amateur 166 Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire theater remained porous in Jewish culture. As Zweig noted, “The step from being an amateur to being a professional actor, and that from being an actor to being a person without theater, is taken with a kind of ease that is inconceivable in the West.”3 Since it combines numerous artistic genres, such as literature, visual arts, dance, acting, and music, theater requires an advanced level of coordination and institutionalization. In addition to the acting that takes place on stage, the production of theater requires a great deal of backstage activity , including securing space, permits, props, and funds. Most important, theater, like all performing arts, requires a public. When a preexisting audience is unavailable, theater must create its own public. Because of the interactions of individuals on stage, behind the stage, and in the audience, theater truly represents what anthropologist Victor Turner has called a “collaborative social performative system.”4 Theater shares many commonalities with spoken-word events; both are fundamentally the recitation of texts on stage. The primary distinction is that in the theater, these texts are enacted in a mise-en-scène. Theatrical texts combine verbal and nonverbal elements to varying degrees. There are exceptions to this rule—in mime, for instance, verbal communication is absent—and by the early twentieth century, new modes of theater were already deemphasizing the verbal element in favor of dance and costume. But in general it is the interplay between the verbal and nonverbal, the aural and the visual, that defines theater. Theater can be related to ritual and often evolves out of ritual performances ; many cultures include elaborate staged and masked performances that enact scriptural narratives as part of their sacred ritual. This is often the primary means of transmitting knowledge of scripture to largely illiterate populations. Indian performances of the Ramayana or Christian passion plays are examples of this type of performance. The core of the Jewish Sabbath and holy day prayer ritual is also the recitation of scripture, but despite the highly ritualized recitation, which includes an elevated stage (bime), specific attire (prayer shawl), and a procession, the story is not enacted and therefore is distinct from normative theater. Jewish theater may have evolved more out of the ritual tradition of...