The Unfinished Art of Theater : Avant-Garde Intellectuals in Mexico and Brazil / Sarah Townsend.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Townsend, Sarah, author.

Series:

Performance works

Performance Works

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Performing arts.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (311 pages).

Other Title:

Knowledge Unlatched.

Place of Publication:

[Place of publication not identified] : Northwestern University Press, 2018.

System Details:

text file

Summary:

The avant-garde posits the possibility of total rupture with the past. This book pulls back on this futuristic impulse by showing how theater became a key site for artists on the edge of capitalism to reconfigure the role of the aesthetic between 1917 and 1934. The book argues that this "unfinished art"-because of its 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 archival research, Townsend reveals the importance of avant-garde projects that belie the rhetoric of rupture and immediacy: ethnographic operas, populist puppet plays, children's radio programs, a philosophical drama about the birth of a new race, and an antifascist spectacle written for a theater shut down by the police. The book argues that avant-garde art is tied to the experience of dependency, delay, and the uneven development of capitalism.

Contents:

Mexico

Chapter 1 Rehearsals of the Tragi-Co(s)mic Race p. 27

Chapter 2 Primitivist Accumulation and Teatro sintético p. 63

Chapter 3 Radio/Puppets, or The Institutionalization of a (Media) Revolution p. 99

Brazil

Chapter 4 Parsifal on the Periphery of Capitalism p. 137

Chapter 5 Phonography, Operatic Ethnography, and Other Bad Arts p. 175

Chapter 6 Total Theater and Missing Pieces p. 209.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Local Notes:

KU Select 2019: HSS Backlist Books

BiblioBoard internal publisher id: 3704

ISBN:

9780810137400

Access Restriction:

Open Access Unrestricted online access