After the Long Silence: The Theater of Brazil's Post-Dictatorship Generation / Edition 1

by Claudia Tatinge Nascimento

Overview

After the Long Silence offers a ground-breaking, meticulously researched criticism of Brazilian contemporary performance created by its post-dictatorship generation, whose work expresses the consequences of decades of state-imposed censorship.

By offering an in-depth examination of key artists and their works, Cláudia Tatinge Nascimento highlights Brazil’s political trajectory while never allowing the weight of historical events to offset key aesthetic trends. Brazilian theater artists born around the time of the nation’s 1964 military coup experienced the oppressive rule of dictatorship throughout their formative years, but came of age as Brazil re-entered democracy some two decades later. This book showcases how the post-dictatorship generation developed performances that mapped the uncharted territories of Brazil’s political trauma with new dramaturgies, site-specific and street productions, and aesthetic experimentation. The author’s in-depth research into a wide array of archival materials and publications in both Portuguese and English demonstrates how the artistic practices of significant post-dictatorship artists such as Cia. dos Atores, Teatro da Vertigem, Grupo Galpão, Os Fofos Encenam, and Newton Moreno were driven by critical thinking and a postcolonial sentiment, proving symptomatic of the nation’s shift from an ethos of half-truth telling into a transitional justice that fell short in affirming citizenship.

Ideal for scholars of the intersection of theatre and politics, After the Long Silence: The Theater of Brazil’s Post-Dictatorship Generation offers insight into the function of theater in times of political turmoil and artmaking practices that emerge in response to oppressive regimes.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781138608443
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	07/26/2019
Series:	Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies
Pages:	268
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Cláudia Tatinge Nascimento is an artist-scholar with an interest in experimental and Brazilian performance. She is a professor and chair of the Theater and Dance Department at Macalester College.

Table of Contents

The year is 1964: April Fools’, or a historical preface 1. The theatricalities of the post-dictatorship generation 2. To rehearse is to devour: cannibalizing the canon 3. Remembering in green and yellow, or the handiwork of telling 4. Theatrical entradas: expeditions into the territories of history A postface, or the secret science of forgetting

Editorial Reviews

Of the Brazilian theater scholars now active in the US, Tatinge Nascimento comes closest to the teacher-critic-director ideal. Her After the Long Silence: The Theater of Brazil’s Post-Dictatorship Generation has the merit of avoiding the trap of the traditional categories into which this type of study is usually divided. While not underestimating the challenges involved, new directions are proposed for the writing of a genuine criticism of the Brazilian performance vanguards. Drawing from an original research that looked at diverse modes of expression, including manifestoes, playbills, group archives, experimental texts, and public performances, enables the book to provide ample evidence of Tatinge Nascimento’s grasp of the importance of understanding historicity in relative terms, never allowing the weight of historical events to offset the key aesthetic trends in Brazilian contemporary performance.

- Severino Albuquerque, Professor Emeritus, Spanish and Portuguese Department at UW-Madison

"This well-written monograph deserves praise and a prominent place in university library collections and in the personal archives of scholars of Brazilian studies and Latin American theatre."

- Steven F. Butterman, Latin Theatre Review

"Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals." - CHOICE

"After the Long Silence is the only academic monograph published in the United States to provide a comprehensive survey of a broad period of Brazilian theatre, a significant feat. […] Insightful not only for those who wish to better understand Brazilian theatre, but also for any reader who strives to have a more global grasp on the generation that was marked by the end of the cold war, the expansion of global neoliberalism, and the reckoning with the past."

- Marcos Davi Silva Steuernagel, University of Colorado Boulder

From the Publisher