Mass Games - North Korea

North Korea

Mass games is now performed only in the May Day Stadium (highest capacity seating stadium in the world) but in the '90s there were mass games held at the Kim Il Sung Stadium. Mass Games can basically be described as a synchronized socialist-realist spectacular, featuring over 100,000 participants in a 90 minute display of gymnastics, dance, acrobatics, and dramatic performance, accompanied by music and other effects, all wrapped in a highly politicized package. Students practiced every day from January onwards. The 90 minute performance is held every evening at 7pm and features the 'largest picture in the world' a giant mosaic of individual students each holding a book whose pages links with their neighbours’ to make up one gigantic scene. When the students turn the pages the scene or individual elements of the scene change, up to 170 pages make up one book.

According to Kim Jong Il, the philosophy behind the events was that:

Developing mass gymnastics is important in training children to be fully developed communist people, to be fully developed communist man, one must acquire a revolutionary ideology, the knowledge of many fields, rich cultural attainments and a healthy and strong physique. These are the basic qualities required of a man of the communist type. Mass gymnastics play an important role in training schoolchildren to acquire these communist qualities. Mass gymnastics foster particularly healthy and strong physiques, a high degree of organization, discipline and collectivism in schoolchildre. The schoolchildren, conscious that a single slip in their action may spoil their mass gymnastic performance, make every effort to subordinate all their thoughts and actions to the collective —Kim Jong Il, On Further Developing Mass Gymnastics. Talk to mass Gymnastics Producers. April 11th 1987