Workers' Youth Theatre, also known as TRAM (the Russian acronym for "Teatr RAbochey Molodyozhi") was a

Soviet The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

proletarian The proletariat (; ) is the social class of wage-earners, those members of a society whose possession of significant economic value is their labour power (their capacity to work). A member of such a class is a proletarian or a . Marxist philo ...

youth

theatre Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers, usually actors to present experiences of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a Stage (theatre), stage. The performe ...

of the late 1920s and early 1930s. It was established by Mikhail Sokolovsky in a converted cinema on Liteiny Prospekt,

Leningrad Saint Petersburg, formerly known as Petrograd and later Leningrad, is the List of cities and towns in Russia by population, second-largest city in Russia after Moscow. It is situated on the Neva, River Neva, at the head of the Gulf of Finland ...

. The theatre was run as a

collective A collective is a group of entities that share or are motivated by at least one common issue or interest or work together to achieve a common objective. Collectives can differ from cooperatives in that they are not necessarily focused upon an e ...

and produced

agitprop Agitprop (; from , portmanteau of ''agitatsiya'', "agitation" and ''propaganda'', "propaganda") refers to an intentional, vigorous promulgation of ideas. The term originated in the Soviet Union where it referred to popular media, such as literatu ...

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 Helmut Damerius (16 December 1905 – 29 September 1985) was a German communist, theatre director, writer and the founding member of the Left Column (theater troupe), Left Column, an agitprop theater group. As the Nazi Party gained in strength, he ...

led the two groups from 1931 to 1933.

Adrian Piotrovsky Adrian Ivanovich Piotrovsky () ( – 21 November 1937) was a Russian Soviet dramaturge, responsible for creating the synopsis for Sergei Prokofiev's ballet ''Romeo and Juliet''. He was the "acknowledged godfather" of the Workers' Youth Theatre (T ...

was the theatre's principle ideologue, and

Dmitri Shostakovich Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich, group=n (9 August 1975) was a Soviet-era Russian composer and pianist who became internationally known after the premiere of his First Symphony in 1926 and thereafter was regarded as a major composer. Shostak ...

composed some incidental music for a number of its productions.Frolova-Walker & Walker, p. 373 By 1930 the theatre was under attack, accused of "formalism" by its critics from among journalists and rival proletarian organizations.McBurney, p. 160

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. .

References

Modernist theatre Propaganda in the Soviet Union Culture of the Soviet Union Theatre in the Soviet Union Youth theatre companies {{USSR-stub

See also

Sources

References