Shaking the Past: The Russian Academic Youth Theatre

Abstract

The former Central Children’s Theatre, now the Russian Academic Youth Theatre (RAMT) was in the mid-1990s still one of the largest theatre for young audiences companies in the world, with some 70 actors, 4 directors, an orchestra of 20, several designers and over 30 staff members (Na Teatral’noi).¹ But in 1996 they had to give up their small stage to the Bolshoi theatre and rent out a large part of their building to private businesses (among others a wood­working shop and a one-man copy shop). Under the Soviet regime, in its official ideological function, the image of the theatre as first rate, especially in its children’s productions, was incontestable. By the mid-1990s the theatre struggled to keep up its reputation, not only in their new productions for mixed audiences or adults, but also in their productions for children. The rise of Glasnost and Perestroika contested the traditional ideological function of the theatre, and its perpetuated image of a cultural haven for youth of all ages. The name change was an attempt to defy the negative image, and reestablish its reputation, but as the pedagogues acknowledged “it will cost a lot of time” (Tikhonova, pers. into. 1996).