ABSTRACT
In the early twentieth century, the urban everyday that was so easily commodified by the metropolitan newspaper, the-orama, and photography transformed into a source of political danger for the bourgeoisie. In the USSR in particular, many artists who supported a workers' revolution believed that it necessitated concomitant revolutions in structures of perception and methods of art production. Along with the pedagogy of reception, many early pro-Soviet avant-garde works tried to evoke a particular revolutionary version of documentary exchangeability. Erwin Piscator and his Russian contemporaries Sergei Tretiakov and Sergei Eisenstein, in different ways, tried to evoke documentary exchangeability for revolutionary purposes, using documents as tethers bridging onstage theatrical worlds with offstage social worlds. Communist avant-gardes were not interested in maintaining small utopian social spaces. With Rasputin, Piscator achieved a level of information saturation onstage that some spectators were simply unable to process.
