Karim Tinchurin Theatre

Actors from the company created by Karim Tinchurin took productions to Tatar villages and managed without a permanent venue for fifty-five years. Today, the theatre bearing his name occupies the Grand and Small Halls in the triangular building whose facade faces Lake Kaban. Tinchurin's musical drama The Blue Shawl was the production that opened this stage.

This stage was built for the Galiaskar Kamal Theatre—named for the playwright who stood at the origins of public theatre in the Tatar language. Work began in nineteen seventy-two and stretched out for nearly fifteen years. Funding was repeatedly cut or redirected to other needs.

The chief director, Marsel Salimzhanov, fought to keep the original estimate in full. He was responsible for the company and understood the cost of such savings: rooms where actors were to rehearse, change costumes, and put productions together would disappear from the project. Salimzhanov would not concede a single ruble, and the building was eventually completed without cutting back the main auditoriums and foyers.

But they demanded that it open for the eightieth anniversary of Tatar theatre, while the service section was still unfinished. Salimzhanov resisted the move, but could not refuse. Later, his students recalled that behind the auditoriums open to audiences lay cramped conditions: the only rehearsal room was a small former director's office, and four actors prepared at once in one dressing room. The company received a large home, but spent many more years adapting it for daily work.

In January nineteen eighty-seven, the new stage opened with The Blue Shawl. This musical drama was written by Karim Tinchurin—the man whose name is now on the building. For him, theatre was not only a Kazan stage. In nineteen thirty-three, the playwright and director secured the creation of a special company that was to take productions to Tatar villages. It was organized as a branch of the academic theatre. The actors performed their first production, Grandfather Bulat's Family, a play by Tinchurin and Kavi Najmi, in the village of Shali, after which they set out on permanent tours.

For fifty-five years, this company had no permanent auditorium of its own. In nineteen eighty-eight, it was given its founder's name, transferred to the category of resident theatres, and given the Former Kamal Theatre Building on Gorky Street. When the Kamal company left that stage in nineteen eighty-six for this building by Lake Kaban, the Karim Tinchurin Theatre moved in after them.

In nineteen twenty-five, the story repeated itself at the same address. The Galiaskar Kamal Theatre moved to a new complex on the other shore of the lake, and the Tinchurin company received the vacated Grand and Small Halls. On October tenth, it performed its first premiere here—Following a Dream.

On the stage that The Blue Shawl by Tinchurin opened in nineteen eighty-seven, the rural touring company he created long ago now performs permanently.