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.

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"A play, film, exhibition, piece of music or book about a revolution can be terrifying, pretentious, or neutral. But it is a rare artist who will present, along with historical correctness, a human body that is not mutilated, but multiplied by the myth of the revolution, embodied after the fact in almost ancient statues and bas-reliefs with male discus throwers and female Venus. In the performance by Maxim Didenko and Dmitry Brusnikin's Workshop, the image of a rioting crowd eventually turned into a sculptural ensemble of hot, half-naked bodies. The power of the moment, of course, saves the performance from what Bakhtin calls “the impact on the material and bodily lower parts,” but it is impossible to take your eyes off."

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