A Theatre for the Workers, Protest as Performance, and the Political Police as (Art) Historian. A Plea for the Rediscovering of Interwar Peripheries

Abstract

The article argues the importance of a renewed approach of the proletarian and Agit-prop theatre in interwar Romania, as well as forms of political proto- performances, as sociological and political phenomena, more than as aesthetical ones, based especially on the research of primary sources. Due to the  specific political context of the period and the harsh censorship, these primary sources are mainly to be represented by the files of the political police of the  time, Siguranţa. Taken over by its communist successor, these files were manipulated and reinterpreted according to occasional political needs: any  research of the original documents is an archaeological process dealing with both the analyzed activity per se and the politicization of archives during the 1948-1989 period.