The Blue Blouse was an influential agitprop

Agitprop

Agitprop is derived from agitation and propaganda, and describes stage plays, pamphlets, motion pictures and other art forms with an explicitly political message....

 theatre

Theatre

Theatre is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music or dance...

 collective

Collective

A collective is a group of entities that share or are motivated by at least one common issue or interest, or work together on a specific project to achieve a common objective...

 in the early Soviet Union

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

. Boris Yuzhanin created the first Blue Blouse troupe under the auspices of the Moscow Institute of Journalism in 1923. Their example encouraged similar workers' theatre companies across the country and worldwide; by 1927 there were more than 5,000 Blue Blouse troupes in the Soviet Union with more than 100,000 members. In the autumn of that year, the original troupe began a tour in Erwin Piscator

Erwin Piscator

Erwin Friedrich Maximilian Piscator was a German theatre director and producer and, with Bertolt Brecht, the foremost exponent of epic theatre, a form that emphasizes the socio-political content of drama, rather than its emotional manipulation of the audience or on the production's formal...

's theatre in Berlin

Berlin

Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...

 that provoked a rapid growth of agitprop troupes across Weimar Germany. The blue workers' uniforms in which the actors performed gave the troupe its name, under which they also published a magazine, which contained scripts and detailed descriptions of staging, costumes, and the troupe's other theatrical techniques, along with news reports and current affairs. Its variety style made many demands on its performers, requiring "a young deft man trained in physical culture

Physical culture

Physical culture is a term applied to health and strength training regimens, particularly those that originated during the 19th century. During the mid-late 20th century, the term "physical culture" became largely outmoded in most English-speaking countries, being replaced by terms such as...

, trained in the striking word, in the cheerful, bold and hard-hitting song and couplet, in the contemporary rhythm of the grotesque and simplistic," its magazine explained. The rehearsal process was extremely rigorous, requiring that actors stay physically and mentally alert through a strict exercise program and by keeping up with the political topics of the day. 1927 marked the end of the Blue Blouse organisation when it was forced to merge with the more orthodox Workers' Youth Theatre

Workers' Youth Theatre

Workers' Youth Theatre, also known as TRAM was a Soviet proletarian youth theatre of the late 1920s and early 1930s. It was established by Mikhail Sokolovsky in a converted cinema on Liteiny Prospekt, Leningrad. The theatre was run as a collective and produced agitprop pieces designed to educate...

(TRAM).