`Dealing emotional blows': realism and verbal `terror' at the Russian state theatrical academy

Abstract

In October 2002, Chechen rebels took hostages at a performance of the first Russian `musical'. During this time, the author was conducting fieldwork at the institute where the actors in this performance had been trained, in the directing department, in a new program combining musical theater with Stanislavsky's realism. In tracing social and ideological associations across these sites, the author outlines a resonance between terrorist and realist ideologies about communication. Muscovites producing metadiscourse about events and processes in both sites seemed to presume that communicative acts, if they are to performatively alter the social world, must stimulate emotion by orchestrating particular social differences. This article will explore, in contexts of theatrical pedagogy, relations between `difference', `conflict', and `feeling' within ideologies of communication that drive both theatrical realism and readings of terror. I do not argue that all forms of making `difference' constitute terror, but rather that realism and terror can both use difference similarly to draw or to focus attention.