Dismembering the Workers Theatre Movement
 

This paper arises from an ongoing SSHRCC-funded investigation into the Workers Theatre Movement, 1929-1936. As such we are proposing it as a joint presentation that draws on faculty and graduate student research. The “Workers’ Theatre Movement” enters history as both canonical fact and political fiction, as something that did and did not exist, because even the act of naming the ‘‘movement” re-imagines a past for a previously imagined future. Past and future subjunctivities bridge a historically conditioned silence. In one direction, this leads the conclusion that there was no “workers’ theatre movement” as it has been remembered, passed down, commemorated and canonicaly situated; in another direction, it leads to the conclusion that the performance culture of the radical left of the 1930s was intensely rich, dense, busy and polyphonic. In all of these we are faced with the proposition of historical practices as lived experience collapsed into authorizing and regulating scripts. In theatre culture, the script is the transactive, rehearsable remnant of performance. The texts of history, in contrast, are the diverse, disjunctive assemblies of evidence, commemoration and practices of what Raphael Samuel has called ‘the theatre of memory,” which he proposes as a counter-discourse to the professionalized hierarchies of “autarchic” historical knowledge (4). If historical practices and performativities are texts, they are by and large unrecoverable, with the added complication that those which are recoverable (such as the published playscripts of the workers’ theatre) are not only exceptional but misleading: they evidence not the work of a movement but the situational tactics of the strategic attempt to organize a movement. The inscape -- the imagined past -- of the Workers’ Theatre Movement emerges in the discernable absences of an ideologically conditioned history that has been retroinscribed in the discourse of national popular art and placed in an ideological genealogy of oppositional culture. The existence of the WTM has been accepted as a matter of record by theatre historians, based on a small number of recuperative historical surveys, interviews, archival documents, newspaper coverage and a few memoirs (by Toby Gordon Ryan, Dorothy Livesay and Peter Hunter)) and biographies (of Joe Zuken and Tim Buck). The canonized history of the Workers’ Theatre Movement rests on three fundamentals: that it was independent from (but allied with) the Communist Party, that it “evolved” or “matured” into the professionalized aesthetic regime of the Popular Front “Theatres of Action” and “New Theatres,” and that it was a genuine movement. This paper follows Alan Filewod’s previous work on the first two of these assumptions and engages with the third by asking, “was there a movement in the Movement?” Our investigation into this problem builds through three stages: an examination of the imagined past (the inscape of the movement), a dismembering that questions the politics of memory in that inscape, and a reconstitution of the elative performative practices of the Communist Party at play (in Mayday celebrations, party picnics and jamborees, “red funerals” and mass rallies).