Fascism - Special Issue: (Re)Living Greece and Rome: Performances of Classical Antiquity under Fascism, edited by Eleftheria Ioannidou, Giovanna Di Martino and Sara Troiani, Dec 2023

This special issue examines the use of classical antiquity within artistic, cultural, and political events under fascist regimes in the interwar period. Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany promoted the production of ancient drama, alongside forms of theater modelled on Greek antiquity, organized grand-scale classical spectacles, and deployed ancient themes and classical-looking symbols and insignia at political gatherings and displays. The analyses presented in this special issue bring into dialogue the scholarship on theater and culture under fascist regimes with the growing literature on the reception of the classics to foreground the significance of performative practices in reconfiguring the classicizing mythologies of fascism. It is the hope of the guest editors that the findings presented here will contribute to the study of performances that strove to re-enact historical pasts beyond the scope of classical reception.

The forms of popular and mass theater developed in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany reached back to classical antiquity to reinvent theater as a secular rite. At first glance, the use of the theatrical medium is at odds with the classicizing monumentality that characterized the cultural expression of fascist regimes. Theatrical performances are by their very nature ephemeral events; unlike monuments, they do not leave their mark on civic space, and can barely provide a testament to generations to come. Drawing on performance theory and cultural history, the author argues that these antiquity-inspired performances provided powerful sites of re-enacting the myth of national rebirth. Fascist regimes used open-air theaters and forms modelled on Greek theater, whilst also tapping into the notions of performance that had been developed within the traditions of the theatrical vanguard to offer the experience of a reborn past. These performances brought forth grandiose visions of classical antiquity through living bodies and helped to embed the imagined past into a mythicized present. The intertwining between the theatrical medium and classical reception allow us to demonstrate the significance of embodied practices in shaping fascism’s political radicalism.

This article surveys and analyzes classical performances staged between 1928 and 1938 in the archeological areas of Agrigento and Paestum, and underlines similarities and differences between them to evaluate the impact of Fascist ideology on their organization. Indeed, these performances were much more concerned with staging ancient poetry recitations, pantomimes, choreographies, and parades rather than entire plays, as these were effective conduits for Fascism’s visual aesthetics, which was aimed at enhancing the archeological settings that hosted them. The events organized in Agrigento were meant to extend the presence of classical performances in ancient theaters and monuments other than Syracuse under the supervision of the National Institute of Ancient Drama (INDA) and other national and international artists, while the performances staged in Paestum were intended to promote international tourism in Italy, which included the programmatic restoration and renovation of ancient monuments.

This article discusses the collaboration between Benito Mussolini and Giovacchino Forzano in the writing of three historical dramas, focusing on the third text of their collaboration, Cesare, which dates to 1939. Placing this partnership within the context of Fascism’s broader theatrical programming, the essay discusses the play as a model of Fascist theater, for its imparting of Fascist ideological tenets, propagandistic messages, and pedagogical aims. It focuses in particular on the ways in which the play uses the analogy between ancient Rome and Fascist Italy, and between Julius Caesar and Mussolini, embodying fascism’s poetics of history, contributing to the anthropological revolution, and overall demonstrating the ‘new fascist man’ through the character of Caesar/Mussolini.

This article discusses the practices of documentation and archiving related to classical performance in the Italian Fascist regime, and their implications for the study of fascist art and culture more widely. The first part discusses a number of institutions as the sites of Italian Fascism’s archiving of classical performance. The second part, drawing on the work of Eric Ketelaar and Amalia G. Sabiescu, considers how Italian Fascism made use of the historically connoted ‘cultural tools’ of ancient Greek theatre as ‘living archives’. It discusses the aesthetic means that came to characterize all classical performances as living archives and considers the use of ancient Greek and Roman sites all over the peninsula and in colonized Libya as the archival sites of the classical performances. In the conclusion, it argues that the combination of performance and archives empowered these cultural tools to become the means for the reconstruction and transmission of Fascism’s newly crafted social memory and identity of the Italian nation.

At the end of the nineteenth century, under the influence of chronophotography and the arguments of the French musicologist Maurice Emmanuel, it was believed that ancient dance could be recovered for the modern world by animating the figures on ancient Greek vases. This led to a flurry of practitioners of so-called ‘Grecian’ dance across Europe, the US and the British Empire. At the beginning of the twentieth century, moving like a Greek became as popular and as liberating for women of the upper classes as discarding a corset and dressing in a Greek-style tunic. In the Edwardian period, since the most celebrated practitioners of Greek dance were women, this new corporeal Hellenism was viewed with deep suspicion as a perilous bid for Sapphic liberation from the patriarchy. But this new corporeality was no less part of a wider utopian return both to nature and the ideal of the collective that laid the groundwork for fascist appropriations of Greek dance in the 1920s.

The aim of this article is to show that readings of Riefenstahl as an artistic genius with full control over all aspects of her work have closed off more complex readings of the prologue of her film Olympia (1938). The author argues that we cannot begin to appreciate the density of this section of the film and its complex attitude toward ancient Greece without taking a closer look at the troubled collaboration between Leni Riefenstahl and Willy Zielke as two filmmakers with different visions, preoccupations, methods of work, and degrees of involvement in the making of the prologue. Attention is drawn to the hermeneutic difficulty of policing the boundaries between different types of aesthetics and different types of politics as they are played out in this section of Olympia. The article also teases out some of the difficulties around the question of how to situate the different themes and practices of the prologue within broader cinematic and extra cinematic histories of fascist aesthetics as they intersect with issues of classicism and modern subjectivity.

Based on fresh archival research this article examines the exchange of Romanizing statuary between Italy and Spain during the ventennio fascista. Between 1933 and 1943, Italy and Spain exchanged copies of Roman statues as symbolic gestures, to substantiate their claims to a shared classical heritage of ‘imperial greatness’. Using press reports and documentary film excerpts the article reconstructs public events that took place in Merida, Tarragona, Palma, and Zaragoza and assesses their impact. Behind these exchanges, and public ceremonies staged on their occasion, lay the Fascist concept of romanità: an archaeologically and aesthetically charged discourse placing Late-Republican and Early-Imperial Roman heritage in the epicentre of Fascist identity politics. Through improvised public performances of romanità, classical materialities, monumental as well as spatial, were imbued with Fascist dynamics, as the past turned into the present and projected into the future. Through individual and collective performance these ceremonies embodied a primeval Fascist ideal that appeared at once spectacular and modern.

This article explores the role of the Latin language in the context of political performance and spectacle under Italian Fascism. We investigate the different ways in which Latin words, phrases, and texts are used as visual and symbolic elements of Fascist performances and how they are staged in contemporary media coverage. Specifically, this article focuses on three case studies: first, human mosaics of the word DVX; second, the use of a tapestry bearing a Latin motto in the context the fourteenth anniversary of Fascism; and finally, the role of a Latin foundation deposit in an inauguration ceremony for building works at the Esposizione Universale di Roma. Two main arguments connect the three case studies. First, we argue that the Latin language does not simply gesture towards Roman antiquity, but that it is used to evoke several different pasts at the same time. Second, we show that the Latin language has a range of affordances for diverse audiences, which are tied closely to the visuality, materiality, and symbolism of Latin during the ventennio fascista.

The beginning of the Third Reich saw the construction of large architectural structures to host and aesthetically frame Nazi mass events. The significance of these buildings cannot be understood without the propaganda and mass performances that constituted their contemporary frame of reception. This article discusses the Gauforum project in Weimar, constructed from 1937 until 1944. Combining an analysis of common architecture-related propaganda tropes with an examination of architectural design and a reading of the ceremony of laying the first foundation stone, it shows how these elements performed the longed-for Volksgemeinschaft. By framing construction works as the expression of national achievement and an ongoing revolutionary renewal of the nation, Nazi-era architecture propaganda discursively primed the ground for interplay between the material arrangements of architecture and events that afforded an experience of the mythical spatiotemporality of the Volksgemeinschaft. In this way, Nazi architectural propaganda played an efficacious part in the politics of mass events.