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OBERIU Theater in the Context of Early Soviet Amateurism
Author(s) -
CEBULA GEOFF
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
the russian review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.136
H-Index - 24
eISSN - 1467-9434
pISSN - 0036-0341
DOI - 10.1111/russ.12208
Subject(s) - amateur , club , innovator , context (archaeology) , politics , visual arts , the arts , point (geometry) , aesthetics , sociology , art , political science , history , law , archaeology , medicine , geometry , mathematics , intellectual property , anatomy
At first glance, the OBERIU theatrical program could not seem further removed from the amateur performances staged by Soviet workers in small club venues. Whereas the former started from a concept of “pure theater” and advocated self‐sufficient theatrical moments, the latter justified its existence by serving the immediate political and educational needs of the club. Yet these two seemingly incompatible types of theater were brought together by the work of Igor’ Terent’ev, an ardent innovator who derived many of his techniques from the workers’ clubs and directly influenced the OBERIU theater. This article takes Daniil Kharms’s collaboration with Terent’ev as a point of departure for repositioning the OBERIU theatrical program within the various “left” art movements of the 1920s. Such repositioning shows that the theater of OBERIU was engaged in a far‐reaching debate over the professional training requisite for Soviet theaters, while also invested in maintaining an experimental vision of the “left arts.”