Scientific seminar as theater laboratory. Theater laboratory as scientific seminar (Towards a theory of 1970s–1990s unofficial culture in the USSR)

Abstract

The article discusses the values and motivations of interactions at home seminars and their relationship with theater laboratories in the USSR during the 1970s–1990s. The case study focuses on the Laboratory of Directors and Artists of Puppet Theaters under the guidance of the Candidate of Art History I. P. Uvarova and the Laboratory of the School of Dramatic Art of Anatoly Vasiliev. Anatoly Vasiliev's “laboratory revolution” can be placed not only in the context of changing theatrical forms in experimental theater, but also in the context of the sociology of intellectual communities in the USSR in the second half of the 20th century. The theory of the author as producer, put forward by Walter Benjamin, allows us to consider home workshops and studio theater in the USSR of the 1970s as laboratories of new means of intellectual production for the community of producers. The experience of collective thinking was aestheticized by both the community of scientific intelligentsia and the community of theatrical practitioners. Unofficial theater and scientific communities in the USSR were held only by shared values and motivations, and not by common goals. The disappearance of the Soviet scientific and artistic nomenklatura entailed the disappearance and oblivion of practices of intellectual amateur activity.