The Americanization of the Soviet living newspaper
This article examines the migration of a Soviet agitational theatrical form from Russia to the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. The Soviet living newspaper, or zhivaia gazeta, began during the Russian Civil War as a method to act out a pro-Soviet version of the news for mainly illiterate Red Army soldiers. During the 1920s, it evolved into an experimental form of agitprop theater that attracted the interest of foreigners, who hoped to develop new methods of political theater in their own countries. In the United States, the living newspaper format was first adopted by American communist circles. Eventually, the depression-era arts program, the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), incorporated an expanded and altered version as part of its many offerings. Living newspapers eventually became one of the FTP’s most celebrated and criticized performance genres. The political content of American living newspapers was a major factor in the government’s elimination of the FTP in 1939.
Exporting Soviet Culture: The Case of Agitprop Theater
In this article Lynn Mally examines the efforts of a Comintern affiliate called MORT (Mezhdunarodnoe ob“edinenie revoliutsionnykh teatrov) to export models of Soviet theatrical performance outside the Soviet Union. Beginning with the first Five-Year Plan, MORT was initially very successful in promoting Soviet agitprop techniques abroad. But once agitprop methods fell into disgrace in the Soviet Union, MORT abruptly changed its tactics. It suddenly encouraged leftist theater groups to move toward the new methods of socialist realism. Nonetheless, many leftist theater circles continued to produce agitprop works, as shown by performances at the Moscow Olympiad for Revolutionary Theater in 1933. The unusual tenacity of this theatrical form offers an opportunity to question the global influence of the Soviet cultural policies promoted by the Comintern. From 1932 until 1935, many foreign theater groups ignored MORT's cultural directives. Once the Popular Front began, national communist parties saw artistic work as an important tool for building alliances outside the working class. This decisive shift in political strategy finally undermined the ethos and methods of agitprop theater.
Performance and Politics in Popular Drama: Aspects of Popular Entertainment in Theatre, Film and Television, 1800-1976
Preface Acknowledgements Part I. Spectacle, Performance and Audience in Nineteenth-Century Theatre: 1. Introduction Louis James 2. Was Jerrold's Black Ey'd Susan more popular than Wordsworth's Lucy? Louis James 3. Word and image in Pixerecourt's melodrama: the dramaturgy of the strip-cartoon W. D. Howarth 4. Joseph Bouchardy: a melodramatist and his public John McCormick 5. The Music of melodrama David Mayer 6. Popular theatre in Victorian Birmingham Douglas A. Reid 7. Water drama Derek Forbes 8. Equestrian drama and the circus Antony D. Hippisley Coxe 9. Theare of war: the Crimea on the London stage 1854-5 J. S. Bratton 10. Popular drama and the mummers' play A. E. Green Part II. Politics and Performance in Twentieth-Century Drama and Film: 11. Introduction David Bradby 12. Meyerhold and Eisenstein Nick Worrall 13. Erwin Piscator's 1927 production of Hoppla, We're Alive Martin Kane 14. Prolet Buehne: agit-prop in America Stuart Cosgrove 15. Worker's theatre 1926-36 Raphael Samuel 16. The October Group and the theatre under the Front Populaire David Bradby 17. Only the stars survive: disaster movies in the seventies Nick Roddick Part III. Problems and Prospects: 18. Introduction Bernard Sharratt 19. The politics of the popular? - from melodrama to television Bernard Sharratt Appendix Select bibliography General index Index of titles of plays, films, sketches Index of theatres, theatre companies and groups.