From the very beginning of the Futurist movement in Italy in 1909, Russian artists, poets, and critics were well informed about the movement's manifestos and general development. Strong schools of Futurist poetry and painting quickly came into being. By 1913, Russian Futurism was already in full force. In that year, on December 2 and 3, the first Futurist theatre productions took place: Vladimir Mayakovsky's Vladimir Mayakovsky and Alexander Kruchenykh's Victory Over the Sun (T52). However, Mayakovsky and Kruchenykh were not familiar with the first Futurist manifesto devoted to theatre: the Variety Theatre Manifesto (September 29, 1913). Their plays and productions were influenced by general Futurist principles, rather than a specific theatrical theory.

Ken Jacobs’ two-and-three-dimensional shadow play, “ ‘Slow Is Beauty’—Rodin,” was performed over several weekends in the fall of 1974 in a loft at the Idea Warehouse on Reade Street in New York City. The central aim of Jacobs is to make “depth recognition an esthetic event as.is done in dance and sculpture, to tune the audience into the sensuality of depth intervals.”

The traditional shadow play is done by backlighting puppets, hands, or actors who perform behind a translucent screen, curtain, or panel. The effect is flat and two-dimensional. To achieve a three-dimensional effect, Jacobs uses two opposingly polarized sources of light, each of which causes the object before it to cast a shadow. The audience thus sees two separate shadows, which may overlap to some extent, for one object. When the viewer puts on a pair of polarized glasses with eyepieces of opposing polarities, he sees only one image with each eye.

Sergei Radlov (1892-1958) is remembered today chiefly for his inventive Shakespearean productions of the Thirties, during the last period of theatrical experimentation in Stalinist Russia. Yet, Radlov was largely responsible for the growth of an entirely new performance mode in the Soviet theatre—Constructivism. During the years 1920-1922, Radlov's Petrograd group, Theatre of Popular Comedy, drawing its inspiration from Yuri Annenkov's production of The First Distiller (September 24, 1919), popularized many of the performance concepts of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's “Variety Theatre Manifesto.” Within a few months, however, Radlov began to introduce changes that would radically alter the development of Soviet theatre.

Like Annenkov, Radlov received his earliest training in the pre-Revolutionary studios of Nikolai Evreinov and Vsevolod Meyerhold. By the winter of 1918, after organizing the agitational group, The First Communal Troupe in Petrograd, Radlov mounted comic reconstructions of ancient Greek and Russian farces under the auspices of the Theatre Department of the Ministry of Education (TEO).