In the footage of the DAU experience, I was offered the opportunity to watch directly into the actors’ daily life: how they work in the ‘soviet town’, how they cook, eat, drink, interact. A lot of the footage of the film projected onto the screen took place in the communal apartment which was a central place of the life in town in the former USSR. The concept of communal apartment was already imagined by Lenin during the October revolution and it became a reality in the early 1920s. The purpose of the communal apartment was to reunite the proletariat, to bring the spirit of the revolution in everyday life (Buchli, 1997; Boym, 1994). Its organisation was mathematical, it was laid out in a geometrical way, after a recipe in which each person was to have 10 square meters, and each family around 13 square meters (Boym, 1994). The material description of the communal flat by Svetlana Boym resembles the one in the footage: the flats appear small and cramped, with massive curtains everywhere. The kitchen appears as quite comfortable and a good size living-room (1994). In the Theatre du Châtelet the visitor can walk down a corridor looking at a reconstruction of one of the flats the actors lived in.

In the reconstructed Flat of DAU in the Theatre du Chatelet

 

It is possible to perceive the mathematical aspect of communal flat Victor Buchli is describing: each room is square and seems to have been constructed like that for architectural minimalism rather than the dweller’s convenience (1997). There are also curtains separating areas. S. Boym explains that those curtains’ aim was to create privacy between the families living together in communal flats (1994).

♦Bibliography.