Body Language as an Archive of Culture and History: Adolf Shapiro’s Performances on Totalitarian Systems

• In Event: Trauma, Memory, and Resistance in Theatre and Film I

Abstract

Among famous director Adolf Shapiro most important works, is the trilogy he staged in the 1980s at the Latvian Lenin Komsomol Theatre (known also as Riga TYZ). The trilogy explored totalitarian systems seeking to control information, suppress freedom of speech, and, above all, standardize the thinking of the younger generation.
Bertolt Brecht’s Fear and Misery of the Third Reich (1985) addressed National Socialist Germany while drawing parallels with the Stalinist Soviet Union. Boris Vasiliev’s dramatization of Tomorrow Was War (1986) portrayed Stalin’s reign of terror in Russia, while Gunārs Priede’s Snowy Mountains (1986) examined Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in China. The central theme uniting all three productions was the destruction of intellectual and moral values and the "zombification" of the new generation. Drawing direct parallels between the three totalitarian regimes was a bold civic act in the mid-1980s and a precursor to the following perestroika.

Author

• Edite Tisheizere, U of Latvia (Latvia)