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This chapter looks at the history of Soviet theater and arts from 1919 to 1921. Topics covered include the Bolsheviks' promotion of mass spectacles aimed at imposing an ideological vision of history on the masses, with the continuity of class struggle and the ultimate victory of the Russian proletariat; the naming of Meyerhold as director of the Teatral'ny otdel Narkomprosa (TEO, Theatrical Department of Narkompros) on September 16, 1920, making him the most important person in Russian theatrical life; Kamerny Theater founder Tairov; and the creation of the Gosudarstvenny evreysky teatr (GOSET, State Jewish Theater).

The ritual restatement of authority so necessary to the maintenance of kingship represents a common thread in Southeast Asian history. The phrase “theater state” effectively deployed by Clifford Geertz in relation to Bali is eminently applicable even in places where Europeans condescendingly equated the “king” to one of their own provincial mayors. Whether in these enhanced chiefdoms or in larger courts like those of Java or Burma, ceremonial life was “an assertion of spiritual power.” In this performance of power, women were indispensable, usually in supporting roles but at times as directors and lead actors. Notwithstanding regional differences in language, culture, and historical experience, “palace women” across Southeast Asia can be considered in terms of the enactment of royal status, which, by separating a ruler from his subjects, justified and maintained the rationale on which kingship rested. This chapter looks at women and the performance of power in early modern Southeast Asia. It discusses the purpose of royal polygyny, women's roles at royal courts and in the enactment of royal power, women's theatrical performances, and life cycle rituals.

When seen in light of the long history of center-oriented, charismatic space, the Northern Thai culture industry, especially that seeking to revitalize the city, is re-enacting the theater state, attempting to recreate the charismatic potential of the past in order to mobilize it for the future. This leads to a fusion between two cosmologies, or, rather, the adaptation of a past cosmological knowledge to fit the frame of the present. What emerges is a center-oriented, urban notion of progress, one which is juxtaposed to a rural that represents not nostalgia, as it did in European contexts, but the uncanny emergence of ghosts, criminals, and decline.

Chapter 11, “The Buddhist Repertoire, Part 2: Jiankang as Theater State,” is the second half of the third study of various repertoires of political legitimation. This chapter argues that the Liang and Chen regimes in the sixth century built on the developments of the late fifth century and responded to the crisis of the Sinitic repertoire by making the Buddhist repertoire paramount instead. The chapter assesses the politics of bodhisattva ordination and the increasingly public rituals, such as Boundless Gatherings and relic worship, that turned Buddhist legend and ideology into well-established political performances. Jiankang in the sixth century can be understood as an example of a Buddhist “theater state,” a model scholars have used to understand political regimes in non-Sinitic parts of Southeast Asia. Especially when combined with elements of vernacular culture, the Buddhist repertoire proved a more successful fit for Jiankang’s political culture than the Sinitic repertoire had been.

Adorno’s essay ‘Bourgeois Opera’ (1955) characteristically illuminated the form of modernism of which he was eloquently skeptical, this illumination then facilitating the critical comprehension and perhaps re-examination of late-romantic opera as mass-entertainment. In many respects the genre, along with operetta, anticipated and shadowed the nascent cinema in mediating ideas about and experiences of the early twentieth-century city. Popular Austro-German operas by Strauss, Korngold and Schreker responded in different ways to the influence of Puccini in dramatizing the role of musical theatre as representing escape from European urban landscapes of power and opportunity that were at the same time threatening labyrinths of loss and desire where modernity and romanticism confronted each other.

This chapter discusses the ‘Lord’s space’, which refers to the space (or notional space) round a feudal lord, especially a sovereign prince—or, indeed, space symbolically associated with the Lord God. It focuses on literary examples, particularly plays and masques, which were undoubtedly designed in part to assert through their display the prince’s greatness, even if they contained specific contents of an advisory or controversial nature. France and Britain in the seventeenth century are apparently to be regarded as ‘theatre states’. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, the dominant symbol of nature had become the theatre. In the midst of all the significant theatricality, a prince’s location, both in the cosmic or intellectual and in the material theatre, must be a matter of moment. The prince required to be the cynosure of all the looking, so that theatres must be constructed accordingly. That was possible, because in the early seventeenth century court theatres were hardly ever permanent buildings, but rather temporary facilities, usually erected for a single performance, perhaps in a hall of Whitehall Palace that also served many other functions. The chapter then considers the hierarchic ordering of objects and people that had long governed the visual imagination of medieval people.