Let's do the Machine! / Facciamo la Macchina!

The latest dance craze to hit Russia ...the DANCE OF THE MACHINE which officially replaced the Charleston in 1927!

I suspect like most other things Soviet the dance craze was hardly a great success.

Experimentation and extreme tendencies in art, literature, dance, cinema, architecture, fashion and design, were in full swing at the time.
Industrial development was perceived as the means through which the working class could realise its full potential.


It was thought the past - with its elitism and exploitation of simple working people - could be buried and a new, democratic world in which full participation in cultural production and distribution of wealth could be facilitated. How odd these ideas seem now!

I found these snippets in the Museum of Modern Art at Rovereto in Northern Italy. Italian artists and writers through the "futurist" ideas of Fillipo Marinetti were calling for similar new beginnings.

It's fascinating that this type of experimentation was crushed in the Soviet Union - a leftist dictatorship. - and embraced in Italy but quickly snuffed out by the fascist regime in the 1930s.

Does his suggest extremism at both ends of the political scale eventually meet at a similar reactionary point? Or at least, dictatorships depend on control so anarchic tendencies always need to to be reigned in?

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