Attracting over fifteen million visitors, the 1925 Paris Expo had an ambitious goal to create a new modernist style which would reflect the great scientific, industrial, and technological advances that produced a new spirit known as "modern." In April in Paris, author Irena R. Makaryk explores the theatre arts’ vital cultural and political impact at this celebrated international exhibition.

 

Drawing extensively from unexplored archival documents from France, Austria, and North America, April in Paris is the first major study to focus on theatre arts at the 1925 Paris Expo and the audacious Soviet contributions to this fair. Turning a spotlight on the uses and representations of theatricalized spaces, Makaryk analyses their political challenge at a time when relations between the West and the USSR were rife with tension. Copiously illustrated with beautiful colour and black and white illustrations, this book elucidates the complex role of the international fair as a catalyst for spirited cultural debate and for aesthetic change.

Irena R. Makaryk is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of English at the University of Ottawa.

Irena Makaryk's profile page

"Makaryk’s book is a useful addition to literature on both the Paris 1925 Exposition and theatrical modernism and its dissemination, and it is especially heartening to see these topics addressed together. Long may the revolution continue."

<em>Art Margins </em>

"Both engaging and informative, April in Paris offers the reader the ultimate experience: to go back in time as if strolling through the Grand Palais and the numerous pavilions which presented their diverse national achievements and ambitions."

<em>The French Review</em>

"April in Paris is a consistently engaging and insightful monograph, full of the connections that provoke further study."

<em>Theatre Journal</em>

"This book allows us to see that our very understanding of theatrical modernism, even modernism itself, as crafted for and around the Paris Expo, is impoverished if we do not see it as arising explicitly within, and informed by, particular spaces and the meanings ascribed to them."

<em>French History</em>

"For those interested in modernism in theater arts, this book analyzes a crucial moment on the global stage that captures a diverging yet linked path between revolution and restoration, internationalism and nationalism."

<em>Slavic and East European Journal</em>

"The combination of analysis of theatrical art and a chronological and geographical expansion of the history of the 1925 expo makes this book an important study for understanding the pivotal moment that this international show represents in Western cultural history."

<i>H-SHERA</i>

"Makaryk gives a graphic account and gathers up the threads of her thoroughly researched and documented narrative of the international cultural significance of the spectator-designer-performer nexus in this period."

<em>University of Toronto Quarterly</em>

"Organizing her study through a series of questions that bring to the fore the role of modern theater design in charting new forms of space, creativity, and audience, Makaryk also tracks for readers the cultural dynamics of expositions and the role of recalcitrance, primarily on the part of the exposition’s planning committee, in dampening the impact the most modern designs and theatrical experiments could have had on the evolution of theater."

<EM>Slavic Review</EM>

"This book would be of particular interest to researchers investigating the general topics of arts and exhibitions, and the role of international fairs in presenting new concepts in art and design to a world audience. In addition, for scholars of Soviet history this book provides detailed information on the topics of the Soviet Union’s self-image and how it tried to depict itself to the outside world in its first decade of existence, as well as the early Soviets’ attitudes on the role of the arts in promoting their country."

<em>International Journal of Russian Studies</em>

"Overall, April in Paris is extremely well researched, informative, and very readable."

<em>Chukyo University Repository for Academic Resources</em>