The unfinished art of theater : avant-garde intellectuals in Mexico and Brazil / Sarah J. Townsend.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Townsend, Sarah J., author.

Contributor:

Edwin B. Cole Memorial Fund.

Series:

Performance works

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Theater and society.

Experimental theater.

Brazil.

Mexico.

Experimental theater--Mexico.

Experimental theater--Brazil.

Theater and society--Mexico.

Theater and society--Brazil.

Avant-garde (Aesthetics).

Physical Description:

ix, 301 pages ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2018.

Summary:

A certain idea of the avant-garde posits the possibility of a total rupture with the past. The Unfinished Art of Theater pulls back on this futuristic impulse by showing how theater became a key site for artists on the semiperiphery of capitalism to reconfigure the role of the aesthetic between 1917 and 1934. The book argues that this "unfinished art"-precisely because of its historic weakness as a representative institution in Mexico and Brazil, where the bourgeois stage had not (yet) coalesced-was at the forefront of struggles to redefine the relationship between art and social change. Drawing on extensive archival research, Sarah J. Townsend reveals the importance of projects and texts that belie the rhetoric of rupture and immediacy associated with the avant-garde: ethnographic operas with ties to the recording industry, populist puppet plays, children's radio programs about the wonders of technology, a philosophical drama about the birth of a new race, and an antifascist spectacle written for (but never performed at) a theater shut down by the police. Ultimately, the book makes the case that the very category of avant-garde art is bound up in the experience of dependency, delay, and the uneven development of capitalism.

Contents:

Introduction: The uneven stage of the avant-gardes

Mexico

Rehearsals of the tragi-co(s)mic race

Primitivist accumulation and Teatro sintetico

Radio/puppets, or the institutionalization of a (media) revolution

Brazil

Parsifal on the periphery of capitalism

Phonography, operatic ethnography, and other bad arts

Total theater and missing pieces

Postscript: Loose ends.

Notes:

"The Unfinished Art of Theater began as a dissertation written at New York University."

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Edwin B. Cole Memorial Fund.

ISBN:

9780810137400

0810137402

9780810137417

0810137410

0810137429

9780810137424

OCLC:

1007086959