Arts & International Affairs Volume 5, Number 1, Summer 2020 | Page 23

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
The underlying aim of the Communist Party was to allow the masses into the process
of artistic creation, which in turn would (supposedly) ensure an intensification and
diversification of the cultural life of the country. Song of Romania would thus validate
the Party’s strange theory: they believed in a national culture emerging from the masses
and pitted against the bourgeois, “anti-revolutionary” artistic/intellectual elites. Arts
and culture would now finally and fully “contribute to the education of the entire society,
of the youth, in the spirit of endless labor for the growth of socialism in Romania”
(Scînteia 1976:1). The Romanian Communist Party wanted to realise in practice the
rather peculiar idea (which later on metamorphosed into an outright obsession) that
working people cannot simply be neutral, silent beneficiaries and spectators of artistic
acts or cultural activities. Quite the opposite, they need to take on the role of co-creators
(if not sole originators) of the artistic/cultural act. The onus was put on them creating
the much-praised communist “new man”: no longer ignoble, simple workers, but rather
revolutionary creators of civilisation, art, and culture and architects of a long-awaited
glorious era of equality, prosperity, and peace. Song of Romania unified�in a single
platform�the regime’s keen interest to promote a new type of art and culture, with
the phantasmagorical prototype of a “new, multilaterally-developed man” (the actual
expression used by Communist Party authorities). The new man could by no means
remain just a maker/producer of agricultural or industrial goods, but would become
the artisan of a totally new artistic and cultural dawn. For that to happen, art (with
its “bourgeois” elites of professionals) needed to be subsumed under the political discourse
of progress.
The thinking behind Song of Romania encouraged most of all a quantitative expansion
of the (so-called) cultural/artistic activity throughout the country, the focus being to
involve ever-more working people in the act of artistic creation: people in the factories,
in the fields, and on the farms were targeted. Song of Romania was preaching a type of art
“inspired by the contemporary realities, by the history of our people, by the glorious past
of our Party and of the working class” (Scînteia 1976:1). This could be achieved through
an exponential, grandiloquent, and large-scale increase of popular participation in artistic
performances and cultural manifestations. The masses�be they workers in factories
or in the fields�had an obligation, as part of their job descriptions, to prepare various
artistic “moments” for presentation in the Song of Romania festival. To that effect, everybody
was (warmly or less so) encouraged to join the factory’s or village’s folk-dance
group, amateur theatre group, etc. All participant industries, state institutions, factories,
etc. would thus become involved in “promot[ing] a revolutionary and efficiently educative
art” (Scînteia 1976:1). From the onset, the great festival was programmed to be eminently
inclusive: the manifestation would reverberate�on its very wide performative
canvas�in the much-claimed social unity of the entire Romanian people (who rallied
behind the Party, of course). Diversity would be reaffirmed through celebratory kitsch
and the false unity displayed during the gargantuan event: anybody and everybody regardless
of ethnicity or social origin were included, except of course the “bourgeois”
artistic elites.
20