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The Unfinished Art of Theater Avant-Garde Intellectuals in Mexico and Brazil / Sarah J. Townsend.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Townsend, Sarah J., author.
- Series:
- Performance works.
- Performance works
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Avant-garde (Aesthetics).
- Theater and society--Brazil.
- Theater and society.
- Theater and society--Mexico.
- Experimental theater--Brazil.
- Experimental theater.
- Experimental theater--Mexico.
- Genre:
- Electronic books.
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource (313 pages).
- Place of Publication:
- Northwestern University Press 2018
- Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2018.
- Language Note:
- English
- 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:
- 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."
- CC BY-NC-ND
- Description based on print version record.
- ISBN:
- 9780810137424
- 0810137429
- OCLC:
- 1039689908
- Access Restriction:
- Open Access Unrestricted online access
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