The Unfinished Art of Theater

The Unfinished Art of Theater
Author :
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
Total Pages : 428
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780810137424
ISBN-13 : 0810137429
Rating : 4/5 (429 Downloads)

Book Synopsis The Unfinished Art of Theater by : Sarah J. Townsend

Download or read book The Unfinished Art of Theater written by Sarah J. Townsend and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-15 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A certain idea of the avant-garde posits the possibility of a total rupture with the past. The Unfinished Art of Theater pulls back on this futuristic impulse by showing how theater became a key site for artists on the semiperiphery of capitalism to reconfigure the role of the aesthetic between 1917 and 1934. The book argues that this “unfinished art”—precisely because of its historic 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 extensive archival research, Sarah J. Townsend reveals the importance of projects and texts that belie the rhetoric of rupture and immediacy associated with the avant-garde: ethnographic operas with ties to the recording industry, populist puppet plays, children’s radio programs about the wonders of technology, a philosophical drama about the birth of a new race, and an antifascist spectacle written for (but never performed at) a theater shut down by the police. Ultimately, the book makes the case that the very category of avant-garde art is bound up in the experience of dependency, delay, and the uneven development of capitalism.


The Unfinished Art of Theater Related Books

The Unfinished Art of Theater
Language: en
Pages: 428
Authors: Sarah J. Townsend
Categories: Performing Arts
Type: BOOK - Published: 2018-07-15 - Publisher: Northwestern University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A certain idea of the avant-garde posits the possibility of a total rupture with the past. The Unfinished Art of Theater pulls back on this futuristic impulse b
Unfinished Show Business
Language: en
Pages: 320
Authors:
Categories: Musicals
Type: BOOK - Published: - Publisher: SIU Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In this fresh approach to musical theatre history, Bruce Kirle challenges the commonly understood trajectory of the genre. Drawing on the notion that the world
Black Patience
Language: en
Pages: 312
Authors: Julius B. Fleming Jr.
Categories: Art
Type: BOOK - Published: 2022-03-29 - Publisher: NYU Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"This book argues that, since transatlantic slavery, patience has been used as a tool of anti-black violence and political exclusion, but shows how during the C
Theater of Cruelty
Language: en
Pages: 449
Authors: Ian Buruma
Categories: Art
Type: BOOK - Published: 2014-09-16 - Publisher: New York Review of Books

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Winner of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Ian Buruma is fascinated, he writes, “by what makes the human species behave atrociou
Unfinished Memories
Language: en
Pages: 0
Authors: Mary Anne Staniszewski
Categories: Art
Type: BOOK - Published: 2016 - Publisher: Steidl

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Exit Artis an intimate portrait of an institution that from 1982 to 2012 challenged social, political, aesthetic and curatorial norms. Committed to experimentin