In 1965, Yuri Lyubimov staged “10 Days That Shook the World” at the Taganka Theatre, a production that would become legend. He defined the genre himself: “a folk show in two parts, with pantomime, circus, buffoonery, and gunfire, after the book by John Reed.”

In 2017, Maxim Didenko staged a show with the same title at the Museum of Moscow, as part of an exhibition devoted to Lyubimov. It isn’t a reconstruction but a new reading of material that, a hundred years after the events Reed described, has only grown sharper.

“A play, film, exhibition, piece of music, or book about revolution can be terrifying, bombastic, or neutral. But it is a rare artist who will set beside historical accuracy the human body—not mutilated but multiplied by the myth of revolution, embodied after the fact in near-classical statues and reliefs of discus-throwers and Venuses. In the production by Maxim Didenko and Dmitry Brusnikin’s Workshop, the image of the rioting crowd turns, in the end, into a sculptural group of hot, half-naked bodies. The force of the moment, of course, saves the show from what Bakhtin called ‘degradation into the material bodily lower stratum’—but you can’t take your eyes off it.”

(Afisha)