The Unfinished Art of Theater : Avant-Garde Intellectuals in Mexico and Brazil / / Sarah J. Townsend.
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 "unfini...
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| Place / Publishing House: | Evanston, Illinois : : Northwestern University Press,, 2018. ©2018. |
| Year of Publication: | 2018 |
| Language: | English |
| Series: | Performance works.
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (313 pages). |
| Notes: | "The Unfinished Art of Theater began as a dissertation written at New York University." |
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| 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. |
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| ISBN: | 0810137429 |
| Hierarchical level: | Monograph |
| Statement of Responsibility: | Sarah J. Townsend. |