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 Stage(d) Terrorism Birgit Beumers It’s so simple to kill an idea, assassinate the sense in things. . . . The meaning of life, the big idea, . . . it’s in people, it’s in all of us, and no one’s guarding us! —presnyakov brothers On November 8, 2002, the play Terrorism by the Presnyakov Brothers,1 the leaders of Russia’s New Drama movement,2 opened at the Moscow Art Theater, the country’s most prestigious theater, founded in 1898 by Konstantin Stanislavsky. Barely two weeks before the premiere, however, terrorism had struck Moscow’s theater scene in a different and much more real way: for the first time in history a theater became the site of a terrorist attack when Chechen terrorists under the command of Movsar Baraev seized the Dubrovka Theater Center during a performance of the musical Nord-Ost. The siege of several days ended when Russian Special Forces pumped an anesthetizing gas into the theater,entered the theater,and killed all forty-two terrorists. Tragically, 130 of the approximately eight hundred hostages died through the effects of the gas.3 The attack was by no means the first terrorist act in Moscow,4 but for Russia it became a disaster on the scale of 9/11 for the United States,as the journalist Andrei Kamakin has argued: “Destroying the World Trade Center in New York, the terrorists aimed at the heart of world economy; taking hostage the peaceful spectators of Nord-Ost, international terrorism hit the heart of all mankind.”5 Kamakin here emphasizes less the cost in human lives and property damage than the assault on human dignity caused by acts of terror, a point echoed in the words of the character from the Presnyakov Brothers’ play cited in the epigraph to this essay. It is, as Brian Baer argues  birgit beumers in “Narrating Terror”in this volume,the intrusion of violence into the previously protected sphere of everyday life that characterizes terrorism. In this essay I explore the significance of the terrorist attack during a performance of the musical Nord-Ost and discuss the choice of target as well as some public responses, before considering how the reaction to the siege, and to Chechen terrorism in general, has been dealt with in fictional terms and turned into a subject for theater, film, and musical productions. I argue that fictionalization through mass media makes terrorism part of everyday life. As terrorism is enacted—in films, on stage, and in song—it becomes embedded in structures of play that seemingly remove its unpredictability and make it appear controlled. Yet terrorist acts are unpredictable; they represent randomness in a world we would like to see ordered. Thus, the reenactment of such events within firm rules of the game—allowing both repetition and variation—offers, as Johan Huizinga argues in his study of the structures of play, Homo Ludens, a way of perfecting life through rigid temporal, spatial, and generic structures: “[play] creates order, is order. Into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life it brings a temporary, limited perfection.”6 Nord-Ost and Terrorism on Stage On October 19, 2001, the first Russian musical, Nord-Ost, premiered in Moscow.7 For the first time, a show—theatrical or musical—opened in a specially designated venue rather than in one of the numerous repertoire theaters, where it would have taken its turn with other productions. The “stationary”stage for Nord-Ost was also a first step toward aligning musical production with the standards of New York’s Broadway and London’s West End theaters. The venue was the former House of Culture of Moscow’s Ball-Bearing Factory, renamed the Dubrovka Theater Center, which could seat 1,150 spectators and is located in the east of Moscow’s center.Nord-Ost played to an almost full house every night of the first year of its run, a success that cannot be explained solely by a popular cast; indeed, the troupe was relatively young, and its members gained popularity through the musical rather than being recruited as stars.Instead of a star bill,the creative team relied on the reputation of the musicians Georgy Vasilev and Aleksandr Tsekalo, a popular duo also known as “Ivasi,”and a well-known Russian, or rather Soviet, plot: Veniamin Kaverin’s epic Two Captains, which had been awarded the Stalin Prize in 1946.The novel’s plot stretches over thirty years, from 1913 to 1943, including the crucial...

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