Mass Performance: Systems and Citizens examines mass performance systems from the first major festival of the French Revolution through the democratic and socialist movements of the nationalizing nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe, to totalitarian communist and socialist regimes in the twentieth century, ending with contemporary North Korea. While other scholars have studied specific mass performances, this study synthesizes the phenomenon across centuries and countries, focusing on its systemization. Modern nations defining or redefining their identities not only organized mass performances, but also planned to make those performances a permanent component of nationhood. Kimberly Jannarone reveals that mass performance systems, including synchronized gymnastics to choreographed rallies, encapsulate ideals and debates within emerging nations about the relationship of citizens to each other and to their leaders, playing a generative and reflective role in the culture and politics of the modern era. Mass Performance analyzes the specifics of performance choreography and design, the organizational planning and thinking behind the systems, the material circumstances of each system’s emergence, and the broader intellectual milieu in which they developed. 

Although not a comprehensive study of such events, Jannarone’s analysis of the selected mass performance systems yields new theoretical perspectives on these phenomena, a central focus of her study being how political leaders find ways to create a physically coordinated mass body politic, even during times of hardship and war. By interpreting and historicizing mass assemblies of bodies, this study analyzes the choreographies and organizations that brought thousands of people together as an ensemble and kept them together in meaning-making motion.
 

Kimberly Jannarone is Professor in the Practice of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University.

Preface
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Introduction: The Mass Performance of Modernity
I. French Revolutionary Festivals
II. Nationalism and Mass Gymnastics
III. The Nationalist Socialization of the Body
IV. Socialism, Spartakiads, and the International Soviet Style of Mass Performance
V. The Grand Mass Gymnastic and Artistic Performance of North Korea
Conclusion: Massing Alone
Notes
Bibliography
Index