It’s 1920, and 7,000 men in black pants and white tank tops are gathered on a field in Prague. Surrounded by a rapt audience, the men, all sinew and muscle, organize themselves into lines spanning the field and perform carefully coordinated movements of strength and agility. In the performance’s climactic feat, the men divide into equal clusters and climb atop each other to form hundreds of human pyramids.
In the late 19th and early 20th century, mass performances like this one became extremely popular in what would become the nation of Czechoslovakia — a way for those who shared an ethnic, cultural, and linguistic heritage, but not yet a national identity, to create a community of physical culture and egalitarianism. Known as the Sokols, these gymnasts trained in small athletic clubs, all of which joined the mass performances that served as symbols of regional unity and strength for their hundreds of thousands of spectators.
This is one example of the extraordinary historical phenomenon of systematized mass performances revealed in Kimberly Jannarone’s new book, “Mass Performance: Systems and Citizens” (University of Michigan Press). Jannarone, a professor in the practice of dramaturgy and dramatic criticism at David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, explores the phenomenon across centuries and countries, delving into their formation, structure, and impact. She defines mass performance as one involving at least 1,000 performers at the same time and location.
Kimberly Jannarone reads an excerpt from “Mass Performance: Systems and Citizens”
Kimberly Jannarone reads an excerpt from “Mass Performance: Systems and Citizens”
The book covers the little-known mass performance festivals held during the French Revolution, mass gymnastics in Czech and German lands in the 19th and 20th centuries, centralized mass performance in post-World War II socialist states, and, most recently, the highly choreographed mass performances held in North Korea.
“Through spectacular public displays and intimate engagement with human bodies; a deliberate and tight correlation of sensations, emotions, and ideas; and resource-devouring efforts to establish new patterns of interaction and loyalties on a mass scale, mass performance systems aimed at nothing less than physically and psychologically shaping new bodies politic,” Jannarone writes.
Jannarone sat down with Yale News to talk about the power of mass performance, why it’s so useful for totalitarian regimes, and how politics can be reflected in our bodies. The conversation has been condensed and edited.
Your book is about the power that systematized mass performance holds both for individuals and for government/political identities. Why and how are these performances so powerful?
Kimberly Jannarone: Being a performance studies person and having been in huge groups of people doing the same thing at the same time, I know how hard that type of event is to document. So for this book, I wanted to look at what people were discussing when they participated in these performances. They were talking about the sounds they heard and the feeling of togetherness, and very physical things like the sheer mass of people. What I gathered from these descriptions, from mass performances that were very different culturally and historically separate, was that what people were feeling in their bodies was something extreme.
For example, prior to the mass festivals held during the French Revolution, most people had never seen more than a couple hundred people at once before. Half a million people all together at these festivals was a number that no one had ever seen before. And then to have them all swearing a civic oath together at the same time, you know, they were feeling part of a community. And then the meaning-making comes in and they think, “We love France and we’re all brothers.” The body gets sensations that create emotions, and then you have thoughts to give those emotions a framework. The more extreme your physical sensations are, the more extreme your emotions are, and then the more unusual kind of conclusion you might draw from that intellectually. You might be able to accept large intellectual propositions that you perhaps wouldn’t have if you weren’t already in this kind of heightened state.
Let’s talk more about the French Revolution-era festivals. Would you set the scene for the first one, the Festival of Fédération in Paris in 1790?
Jannarone: In 1789, it was clear that things were changing in France. There was movement toward the “Third Estate” — people who were not aristocracy or nobility were gaining political power. And this festival in Paris was meant to convey, “We are going to embrace it. It’s a constitutional monarchy, so we still have a king, and we have a constitution. And all of us are going to be part of the nation.” The idea of a nation was totally new to most people. And there were people who had lived in little hundred-person hamlets who didn’t feel particularly connected to people in big cities. But they went to this festival with a sense that they were going to be part of something bigger.
Some of them walked for days to get there, getting tired and muddy, but meeting other people along the way. They get there and there’s this massive amphitheater with archways, and they’re part of this huge crowd. And at one point, they all swear an oath to this new constitutional monarchy. All the written histories of the event talk about the moment of the oath and how incredibly powerful it was. There were people who didn’t believe in the revolution just a few months later, but at that moment, half a million people in this amphitheater all shouted, “Je le jure!” (I swear it!)
A mass festival during the French Revolution.
And it was pouring rain the whole time, right?
Jannarone: Yes! It was pouring rain and they kept singing and dancing, which is just incredible. I think that not only seeing all those people, but actually feeling their presence, must have been extraordinary. They were celebrating something new and big, and feeling they were all part of it.
Mass gymnastics performances emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries. There was a sense of solidarity among the men training together for these displays, but also a sense that physically fit citizens were representative of a healthy country or a unified social identity. Would you expand on that?
Jannarone: This was a period when there were people — like the Czechs and the Germans — who felt connected culturally, ethnically, linguistically, but did not have a shared national identity. They felt a connection, but they didn’t have a legal framework for it. So, small groups of men began gathering to train together. They were doing things that maybe seemed silly — gymnastic moves and calisthenics, reciting slogans and wearing new outfits that somebody had just made up. There was a lot of inventing of traditions.
Then all these smaller groups would come together to perform at a mass gathering. One of the favorite formations at that time was the human pyramid. It’s so clear to me why: because you depend on the other people in the pyramid for your physical safety. You all must not only be physically fit, but you have to be present. You have to be paying attention, and you have to have rehearsed in order to be safe yourself and keep everybody else safe. That interdependence builds a sense of community togetherness and bonding. And when you are part of something complex, that you’ve rehearsed, that involves dozens, hundreds, or in this case, thousands of other people, there’s a kind of nervousness about it. But when it comes off, there’s a sense of accomplishment. And I think that’s why it becomes a metaphor for a strong national or cultural community.
Still from the "Fireworks" performance in 1960s Prague.
By the 1960s, Czechoslovakia was allied with communist Soviet Union. Thousands of men performed very complex gymnastics performances at the Spartakiad festivals at Prague’s Strahov stadium, then the largest stadium in the world. There was one particularly dangerous formation called the “Fireworks.” Would you describe this routine?
Jannarone: The performers were military reservists, and they were being pushed by the government. The routine in its entirety changed a little bit over the years, but this was the main idea: they started by doing this dramatic run into the stadium, roaring as they streamed in and heard the cheers of tens of thousands of onlookers. They arranged themselves in straight lines and started off by doing uncomplicated movements, which then became gradually more complex and intertwined. Finally, they broke up into small groups. And each group had two lines of men. One line would form a launching pad of sorts by latching arms. Somebody would run up and jump onto the launching pad, which would then launch him into the air. He would be caught by the latched arms of the second line of men, their arms going down almost all the way to the ground as they caught him and would then pop him up onto his feet. He would then stay and participate in the next catch line.
Men were injured all the time performing this formation.
Jannarone: Seriously injured. Vertebral fractures, broken legs. But as I say in the book, the military reservists compared the rate of those injuries to standard combat injuries and said, “Well, they’re about the same, so it’s okay.” They were already part of a bonded and trained community, and they accepted their losses as part of their duty, as far as we can tell, and as part of the price to pay for doing this incredibly inspiring performance that people wanted to see.
Your book talks about how totalitarian regimes embraced mass performance to consolidate their power and reinforce the idea of a single national identity. Why does it lend itself to that so well?
Jannarone: When totalitarian governments have power over the activities of their individual citizens, they can mandate activities that democratic governments can’t. They can say, you need to be a member of this youth group, or you need to participate in this gymnastic activity. And that’s different from the French Revolution or the early Czechs, who did it because they wanted to. Totalitarian governments have total control over the infrastructure of the country. And infrastructure means education, it means stadiums, it means militaries. All the things you need to get mass on that scale. They can command huge numbers of people to work on these productions and provide rewards for people who do, punishments for those who do not. They can get the numbers much higher, and they can get them to a degree of difficulty that would be hard to do using small local groups.
Mass performance is still a phenomenon in present-day North Korea. You write about how much time children there spend learning gymnastics and dance moves, often very difficult ones, to prepare for spectacular, choreographed performances before Kim Jong Un. What is the strategy behind this mass performance training system?
Jannarone: I highly recommend “A State of Mind,” a 2004 documentary that follows two North Korean gymnasts as they are rehearsing for a gymnastics performance. It’s eye-opening. In those two gymnasts, you see how that communal training from an early age affects them and their relationships and their loves and their desires.
If you are young and you’re spending five, six, seven days a week in an activity with other people your age, and you are always being pushed to be really good at it, and you know that the end reward is you might get to do a fantastic, highly skilled performance in front of the leader of your country — there’s no underestimating how that would affect your development as a citizen in that universe. And that’s certainly what the North Korean mass performance training system believes. They have stated explicitly, we are going to train citizens by having them embody our ideals from a young age.
The French philosopher Michel Foucault was influential in my thinking on this. In his book “Discipline and Punish,” he wrote about how our politics can be seen in our bodies. What a community or government does to our bodies shapes what kind of citizens we are. And in North Korea, you see these bodies that are disciplined, are obedient, are trained to strive toward excellence. They are prepared to sacrifice themselves in order to help the higher cause.
