Workers' Youth Theatre Explained

Workers' Youth Theatre, also known as TRAM (the Russian acronym for "Teatr RAbochey Molodyozhi") was a Soviet proletarian youth theatre of the late 1920s and early 1930s. It was established by Mikhail Sokolovsky in a converted cinema on Liteiny Prospekt, Leningrad. The theatre was run as a collective and produced agitprop pieces designed to educate and persuade. The group worked together with the Left Column, a German agitprop group active in Berlin. A number of the group moved to Moscow in 1931. Helmut Damerius led the two groups from 1931 to 1933.^[1]

Adrian Piotrovsky was the theatre's principle ideologue, and Dmitri Shostakovich composed some incidental music for a number of its productions.^[2] By 1930 the theatre was under attack, accused of "formalism" by its critics from among journalists and rival proletarian organizations.^[3]

See also

• Blue Blouse

Sources

• Bradby, David, and John McCormick. 1978. People's Theatre. London: Croom Helm and Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield. .
• Clark, Katerina. 1995. Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, repr. 1998. .
• Drain, Richard, ed. 1995. Twentieth-Century Theatre: A Sourcebook. London: Routledge. .
• Frolova-Walker, Marina; Walker, Jonathan. Music and Soviet Power 1917-1932. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. .
• McBurney, Gerard. 2008. "Shostakovich and the theatre" from The Cambridge Companion to Shostakovich ed. Pauline Fairclough and David Fanning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. .
• Rudnitsky, Konstantin. 1988. Russian and Soviet Theatre: Tradition and the Avant-Garde. Trans. Roxane Permar. Ed. Lesley Milne. London: Thames and Hudson. Rpt. as Russian and Soviet Theater, 1905-1932. New York: Abrams. .
• Schechter, Joel, ed. 2003. Popular Theatre: A Sourcebook. Worlds of Performance Ser. London and New York: Routledge. .
• Stourac, Richard, and Kathleen McCreery. 1986. Theatre as a Weapon: Workers' Theatre in the Soviet Union, Germany and Britain, 1917-1934. London and New York: Routledge. .
• Van Gysegheim, Andre. 1943. Theatre in Soviet Russia. London: Faber.
• Willett, John. 1978. Art and Politics in the Weimar Period: The New Sobriety 1917-1933. New York: Da Capo Press, 1996. .

Notes and References

1. http://www.stiftung-aufarbeitung.de/wer-war-wer-in-der-ddr-%2363%3B-1424.html?ID=526 Biographical details, Helmut Damerius
2. Frolova-Walker & Walker, p. 373
3. McBurney, p. 160