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

• VerfasserIn: Townsend, Sarah J.,
• Place / Publishing House: Evanston, Illinois : : Northwestern University Press,, 2018.; ©2018.
• Year of Publication: 2018
• Language: English
• Series: Performance works.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (313 pages).
• Notes: "The Unfinished Art of Theater began as a dissertation written at New York University."

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.

Table of 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.