The Workers Dance League was formed in the Bronx in 1932 at a May Day event sponsored by The Daily Worker, a Communist-affiliated newspaper. The First Workers' Dance Spartakiade would have coincided with the first anniversary of the group. The use of "spartakiade" to describe the Workers Dance League-sponsored event at The New School is a reference to the competitive nature of the dance program; this Soviet term was usually employed for sports or gymnastics competitions.

The Red Dancers were led by Edith Segal, who also taught dance at Camp Kinderland in the Catskills resort region of New York that served Jewish New Yorkers in the early to mid-twentieth century. According to the dance program, the Red Dancers were "the first adult dance group to be organized in the revolutionary movement," with fifty members. The troupe's address is listed as 77 Fifth Avenue in care of secretary Syd Brohinsky. This address, only three blocks from The New School's 66 West 12th Street building, is also associated with the Dance Group of the Needle Trades Workers Industrial Union.

More background on culturally Jewish Communist-oriented modern dance troupes in New York City in the 1920s and 1930s will be found in Julia Foulkes's article for American Jewish History (88, 2), "Angels "Rewolt!": Jewish Women in Modern Dance in the 1930s."