In early 1992, at a Sunday matinee performance of Gypsy at the Moscow Teatr Romen (Romani Theatre), one spectator out of a small audience of Russian pensioners humming along to familiar melodies exceeded their nostalgia by trying to physically enter the mythic past occurring on stage. 1 He drunkenly stumbled through the dark down the central aisle, waving his arms and crying out the name of the main character: "Budulaj, Budulaj!" Ignoring the stairs at the side, he swung his leg over the front to climb onto the stage, and tried to embrace the actor playing Budulaj. Without breaking character, the actors improvised an exit and an usher led the believing drunk down from the stage, past the marble proscenium arch carved with airplanes and war heroes. 2
Besides illusory links between life and art (as made by a drunk who transgressed the proscenium), and more crudely concrete ones between state hierarchies and cultural activities (as indexed by proscenium carvings), real connections exist between performance and social life. The Teatr Romen is a site where social categories as well as cultural stereotypes are publicly reproduced. Their force is strong, much stronger than in North America or the rest of Europe--hardly a day passes without a Gypsy ensemble on television, as musical backdrops or cameos in film. Budulaj is only one of these types, the hero of a Soviet novel written in the 1960s that was adapted as a play at the Teatr Romen, a film, and then a television series--all titled simply Gypsy. Budulaj is a decorated veteran of the Great Patriotic War (World War II) who travels about the country by motorcycle seeking relatives. On stage or screen the Russians he meets are shaken in their prejudices about Gypsies by his proletarian good sense and literacy--he joins a collective and reads books. But Budulaj also tap dances and glares at people from under thick, dark eyebrows, remaining somehow still a "typical Gypsy." It is this typicality, signs of his primitive difference and "closeness to nature," that Russians appreciate most of all. In a spin-off TV series of the late 1970s (The Return of Budulaj) Budulaj loses his memory of individual biographical events. It is when he is silent, communing with horses, water, or fire, when he plays a tune on his harmonica, that Budulaj remembers his "true" Gypsy self. Budulaj may have been a Soviet patriot, but his Gypsiness conforms to older, pre-Soviet genres that define Gypsies as apart from society or the modern nation. Neither Roma nor Russians usually recognize how such images complicate Roma's social position; instead they justify marginality as born of an innate Gypsy proclivity for antisocial rebellion: "Gypsy Freedom."
A quite tangible real-world effect of performance is that it has become a kind of occupational ghetto for Roma in Russia. Besides playing Budulaj or some other permutation of "The Gypsy," with song in his blood, there are few ways to be a public person as a Rom. For Roma who are non-performers, showing some kind of relation to performance (claiming relatives at the Teatr Romen, for example) and its tropes is among the few legitimate forms of cultural and symbolic capital. The very occupation of performer is numbered among the types represented onstage; offstage, the ability to perform is listed among the traits of the "real Gypsy." It is an occupation that Gypsies are supposed to excel in, to be born for. Still, in part because theatre is framed separately from the rest of social life, even though performance is considered the appropriate occupation for a Gypsy, Romani performers are suspected to be ersatz. Indeed, many people tried to discourage me from beginning research at the Teatr because it produced "kitsch," and the actors there were no longer "genuine."
Romani performers are understandably anxious in the face of this discursive paradox and speak of experiencing cultural identity "complexes." They have a high stake in distinguishing "real" from "pseudo" Gypsiness; backstage and at home, performers who became field consultants took pains to make sure that I, the foreign researcher, understood that none of the actors who have played Budulaj on stage or in the screen and TV versions were Roma; that their Budulaj does not move the right way, snaps his fingers in the wrong direction, uses Romani words in the wrong situations. At the same time, many Romani performers themselves describe Gypsies in stereotypic terms as apart from society, "closer to nature," in ways recognizable in the role of Budulaj. Over the course of several years' fieldwork, I heard numerous Romani performers make such statements as "I have no watch, as we Gypsies are free and do not need to tell time," or "Gypsies don't read music, but sing naturally." One Romani performer who was writing a screenplay wanted the film to portray a life apart from consumption, media, or politics: "Who wants to see that Gypsies have china collections and live in houses like everyone else?" Indeed, she considered houses and property to be signs of cultural decay. 3 There is surely symbolic capital in these kinds of statements about authenticity; however, this kind of capital does not reproduce itself, nor do people reproduce it effortlessly.
Performance is a site where both authentic identity and its antithesis are located, but the question of whether Gypsy stage heroes are "authentic" is not key here. What actually interests me is who is positioned to decide what counts as authentic, why people agonize about whether a performance is authentic or not, and how their theatrical agonies intersect broader discourses about society....
This essay outlines several continuities in discourses on staging authenticity from the beginnings of the Moscow Teatr Romen under 1930s socialism to film production after the Soviet fall in 1992, to show how people reproduce marginal identities as authentic precisely by citing performance....
Stage Traditions and National Cultures: Constructing the New Gypsy
The Moscow Teatr Romen was officially created both to "preserve a national culture" and to "aid the assimilation, sedentarization, and education of nomadic peoples." 5 Some cultural forms (certain songs and dances) were judged authentic enough to preserve, while other practices were to be eradicated, discouraged via moral lessons staged in dramatic conflict. Certain performance forms (other songs and dances) as well as their milieu were also to be liquidated, labeled derogatively "tsyganshchina." 6 This performance milieu and a literary genre related to it both developed from Gypsy choir performances organized by Russian nobles out of Romani serfs at the end of the eighteenth century. 7 Pushkin, Dostoevskey, Tolstoy, Fet, Grigoriev, and later Blok, and even Gorky, inspired by (and adding heat to) the aristocratic rage for Gypsy music, wrote tales and poems that turned on tropes of freedom from society's rules, embodied by female Gypsy singers and the Russian male characters who abandon material wealth and family to follow them. 8 Adaptations of this pre-Revolutionary, romantic literature and of tropes borrowed from it can be found in the repertoire of the Teatr Romen since its beginnings, even in socialist scripts well before Gypsy, and certainly in the 1990s.
Though founded in the middle of the first Soviet five-year plan, the Teatr was created out of the social networks of the pre-Revolutionary Choirs. 9 Though these Roma had sent their children to gymnasium and aspired to bourgeois elegance under the Tsars, as Soviet performers, artists, they became vanguard examples of people who had overcome what various Soviet texts of the time (including state documents as well as films and plays) refer to as repressive "Gypsy custom," as well as the exploitation of the nobles and aristocrats who had frequented their performances. That they had been exploited was, at least, one of the arguments made to Lunacharskii when they first petitioned him to establish the Teatr Romen. Thus, the former association of Gypsy musicians and singers with the aristocracy and merchant class did not entail their doom. Still, there were questions about the actors' authenticity from the beginning, and they had to make special efforts to defend their dramatic authority.
In order to portray and preserve "authentic Gypsy art," the actors went to camps and collectives on what might be called field trips, with basically three purposes. The first was to recruit performers from among "camp Gypsies." 10 The second was to collect "authentic" dances and songs and examples from camp life to incorporate into plays. A third task, which overlapped the efforts of Romani activists for literacy and labor, was to convert traveling Roma to socialism, to "carry out agitation." 11 They would socialize, and then "as if by way of an aside," turn the conversation to socialism, and then perform plays from the repertoire. 12 The pressure to change occurred during production as well as at rehearsals. Urban, choir Roma filled leading roles since they already knew stage conventions, but performers enlisted from the country were to learn to move anew. Women who had always kept their legs covered by skirts were now expected to wear pants to biomechanics lessons taught by Zosima Pavlovich, an actor from the Meyerhold Theatre. Rom-Lebedev describes that when new actresses recruited "from the camps" in the 1930s resisted displaying the shape of their legs in pants for these exercises, Pavlovich chided them by pointing to the experienced choir performers, telling them to take pride in becoming civilized artists. 13 Such constructions of gendered custom, and of differences between the practices of "civilized" and "camp Gypsies," echo into the 1990s, though the 1930s may have valued eradicating them while the 1990s are nostalgic for what is now seen as their loss.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, poets and authors emphasized freedom in Gypsy women. Soviet playwrights, to the contrary, stressed saving them from a captive life of custom, promising to free them from the capricious rule of kin and patriarch. Gendered and kin customs were emblematic not only of backwardness but of class struggle, as in the Teatr's first two plays, Life on Wheels and Between the Flames (both by a Romani playwright), which were thematically driven by conflict between worker Gypsies and wandering "clans." 14 But images of clan conflict, as worked out on stage, spoke as much to prejudices about innate Gypsy "hot blood" as they did to actual social conflicts about modernization and assimilation.
In 1959, a play in fact entitled Hot Blood made its way to the stage. The dramatic conflict opposed a nuclear Romani family settled in a horse-breeding collective to a larger nomadic group with whom the family had once traveled. The settled family continues to value certain traditions (songs and dances) but eschews others, especially those considered to degrade women (arranged marriages or gender-segregated tables). Interestingly enough, the same actresses who wore pants for rehearsal donned elaborate, colored skirts for performance--evidently skirts were, after all, counted among the valued traditions, at least on stage. Even in 1996, several years after the official end of the socialist state, Hot Blood remains part of the Teatr Romen repertoire, and Russian writers describe extended families or brideprice as "patriarchal holdovers." 15
Hot Blood premiered a few years after a 1956 Soviet decree outlawing Gypsy nomadism. However, for all its assimilative content, the Teatr Romen's repertoire has been aimed for decades less to reach Roma than to entertain non-Roma. Only in the first three years of its existence were its plays performed in Romani. Roma did not, however, attend as hoped; Rom-Lebedev describes his first experience on the Teatr's stage:
"Romale shunen'te tume man!" (Romale, listen to me!) I vainly called out in someone else's voice, . . . there were no Gypsies, there was no one to understand. 16
His own words dropped into empty space, rendering them foreign even to himself. To Russians in the audience, the words meant little; embedded within a play, they represented merely a public, secret code in a spectacle about exotic people speaking a foreign tongue. Already by 1935, the Teatr was no longer producing any plays wholly in Romani. Didactic plays were left in the repertoire but were translated into Russian; only musical numbers were in Romani, the words and lyrics serving as background to recognized melodies. At least in the case of the Teatr Romen, socialist realism meant, besides adhering to certain moral imperatives, being intelligible to an ethnic majority. Theatre had to be transparent, familiar. Spectacle regained a place alongside messages of social change; even a version of Carmen was added to the repertoire. This shift was contested for several years, as various board members and commissioners accused the Teatr Romen of being out of touch, non-proletarian, not useful, but in the end, although the Teatr Romen had been established to combat decadent, bourgeois performance in restaurants and taverns (tsyganshchina), Gypsy Freedom, as envisioned by Pushkin, Tolstoy, et al., once more was produced with non-Romani audiences in mind....
The belief that the stage robs Gypsies of their authenticity is reinforced by the historical fact that Romani performers actively took part in proselytizing Roma, trying to transform them from wild parasites to civilized workers--by persuading them to wear modern clothing, for example. Those Roma who lived through the 1930s and the War spent much of their lives arguing that the New Gypsy could work in a factory or become an academic. Besides being settled and urban--in contradiction to the "real," traveling Gypsy, who remains "close to nature"--performers are implicated in a socialist project that some now see as violating nature. The Teatr Romen elite had publicly extolled the benefits of socialism, and championed Romani success stories in medical and scholarly careers. The official push to civilize is long spent, but there remain several different stances toward the past among performers since 1991: some assert that the state destroyed Romani culture, others that it helped preserve it. 29...
Alaina Lemon is Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan Department of Anthropology and Fellow at the University of Michigan Society of Fellows. She has done fieldwork in Russia with several groups of Roma and worked as the analyst on Romani affairs at the Open Media Research Insitute in Prague. She also codirected and coproduced a documentary video with Midori Nakamura on Roma in Russia, T'an Baxtale!, in Romani and Russian with English subtitles.
Notes...
5....As for the assimilative project, the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, or Bolshaja Sovetskaja Entsiklopedija (Moskva, 1974) asserts that the Teatr Romen was intended to facilitate policies such as the 1926 Order of the Supreme Soviet, which provided land to Roma wishing to settle. Later, although Romani schools, journals, and cooperatives of the 1920s were aborted in the 1930s, the Teatr Romen remained....
9. There were also continuities in Socialist policies with those of the Tsars. Both stressed settling Roma and at various times both restricted the movement of Roma into major cities (like the Tsarist Jewish Pale and Soviet resettlements of minorities). Even though many Roma had been settled since the eighteenth century, in 1759 Elizabeth forbade them to enter the capital in St. Petersburg; the law was repealed in 1917 but reapplied later. See Aleksandr German, Bibliografija o tsyganakh: ukazatel' knig 1780-1930 (Moskva: Tsentrizdat, 1931). On Tsarist and socialist policies see also Druts and Gessler, Tsygane; E. Popova and M. Bril, "Tsygane v SSSR," Sovjetskij Stroitel'stvo, 2 (1932); Nadezhda Demeter and Lev Cherenkov, "Tsygane v Moskve," in Etnicheskie gruppy v gorodakh Evropejskoj chasti SSSR, ed. I. I. Krupnik (Moskva: Academy of Sciences, 1987), 40-48. For a summary of some sources in English, see Crowe, A History. On the policy context of the Teatr Romen, see Alaina Lemon, "Roma (Gypsies) in the USSR: The Moscow Romani Theater," Nationalities Papers 19 (1991): 359-72.
10. In the 1930s, the term referred to nomadic Roma. Now it applies to any Roma living in a compact, rural or semi-rural, settlement "with the camp," the tabor.
11. At the same time, other Romani socialist activists paid less friendly, more surreptitious visits to report on "class struggle." One of these reported to the Central Committee a "sordid warren" of camps near Moscow ruled by "Gypsy kulaks" who "with all their strength" keep poorer Gypsies from joining collectives by telling them "false stories" about abuses on collective farms (Gosudarstvennij Arkhiv Rossisskoj Federatsii, fund 1235). The stories may not have been so false, however: there are other reports in the same archives detailing bad conditions on the collectives....
14. Aleksandr German, Romano Teatro. Khelybena: Dzhiiben pre roty--Mashkir jaga--Palago pervo (Moskva: Politizdat, 1932). In "From Savages to Citizens: the Cultural Revolution in the Soviet Far North, 1928-38," Slavic Review 52 (1992): 52-76, Yuri Slezkine argues for a recurring formula of isolating and blaming individual ethnic patriarchs (as kulaks or "wreckers") for failures in social revolution, grounding patriarchy in cultural backwardness, but accusing the mercenary patriarch of perpetuating it....
29. The first group emphasizes cruelty in socialist policies, such as forced settlement laws and the practice of keeping Roma outside the "101st kilometer" of major cities (along with ex-convicts and other internal exiles). The other group emphasizes the free education, clothing, and subsidized housing that in some cases Roma were given before Russians....
[The full text of the article is available at <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theatre_journal/v048/48.4lemon.html> if you have individual or institutional access to the Project Muse.] ***** -- Yoshie
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