Prozodezhda as costume: The function of dress and the actor on Meyerhold’s stage

Abstract

Prozodezhda, or ‘production clothing’, arose in the early Soviet Union amid the post-1917 enthronement of the proletariat as the Soviet nation’s hero. Loose and practical clothing that evokes the dress of labourers, it found traction in the theatre, where Vsevolod Meyerhold famously used prozodezhda in his constructivist productions The Magnanimous Cuckold, of 1922, and The Death of Tarelkin, also of 1922. Prozodezhda as costume, because of its functionality, easily lends itself to an ideological reading in line with the socialist avant-garde’s post-revolutionary efforts to embrace Soviet principles. But an emphasis on the ideological significance of prozodezhda often occludes careful investigation of its aesthetic function and heritage, including its place in modernist costume history. Prozodezhda was very much a new and radical form of costume in line with other modernist experiments, but it seems to facilitate attention to the physical and expressive skills of the performer, rather than to treat the actor as an obstacle that must be concealed, constrained or inhibited. It thus challenges narratives of modernist fragmentation of the human, or it even attempts to overcome this fragmentation in itself by restoring to a modernist aesthetics the possibility of movement that celebrates the wholeness of the human body. It further joins in the modernist resistance to naturalism, character and figural representation, but it does so, curiously, through mimetic reference to the Soviet labourer. My argument relies on analysis of production and costume design images, as well as of primary writings by Meyerhold and his collaborators, by costume designers and by poet and costume theorist Mikhail Kuzmin. I show that prozodezhda draws attention to the fundamental question of the purpose of acting, a question that is particularly potent given the political stakes of theatre in the early Soviet era.