Description |
1 online resource |
Series |
Performance works |
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Performance works.
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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 |
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 |
Notes |
"The Unfinished Art of Theater began as a dissertation written at New York University." |
Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 251-291) and index |
Notes |
Print version record |
Subject |
Avant-garde (Aesthetics)
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Theater and society -- Brazil
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Theater and society -- Mexico
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Experimental theater -- Brazil
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Experimental theater -- Mexico
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PERFORMING ARTS -- General.
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Avant-garde (Aesthetics)
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Experimental theater
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Theater and society
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Brazil
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Mexico
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Form |
Electronic book
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LC no. |
2018008762 |
ISBN |
9780810137424 |
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0810137429 |
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0810137402 |
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9780810137400 |
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