Workers' Youth Theatre
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.<ref>Biographical details, Helmut Damerius Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur, Retrieved December 2, 2011 Template:In lang</ref>
Adrian Piotrovsky was the theatre's principle ideologue, and Dmitri Shostakovich composed some incidental music for a number of its productions.<ref>Frolova-Walker & Walker, p. 373</ref> By 1930 the theatre was under attack, accused of "formalism" by its critics from among journalists and rival proletarian organizations.<ref name="McBurney, p. 160">McBurney, p. 160</ref>
See also
Sources
- Bradby, David, and John McCormick. 1978. People's Theatre. London: Croom Helm and Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield. Template:ISBN.
- Clark, Katerina. 1995. Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, repr. 1998. Template:ISBN.
- Drain, Richard, ed. 1995. Twentieth-Century Theatre: A Sourcebook. London: Routledge. Template:ISBN.
- Frolova-Walker, Marina; Walker, Jonathan. Music and Soviet Power 1917-1932. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. Template:ISBN.
- McBurney, Gerard. 2008. "Shostakovich and the theatre" from The Cambridge Companion to Shostakovich ed. Pauline Fairclough and David Fanning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Template:ISBN.
- 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. Template:ISBN.
- Schechter, Joel, ed. 2003. Popular Theatre: A Sourcebook. Worlds of Performance Ser. London and New York: Routledge. Template:ISBN.
- 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. Template:ISBN.
- 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. Template:ISBN.