Reading a play and watching it performed onstage are quite different experiences. Likewise, studying a country's theatrical tradition with reference only to playtexts overlooks the vital impact of a play's performance on the audience and on the whole artistic community. In this performance-centered approach to Brazilian theatre since the 1940s, David George explores a total theatrical language—the plays, the companies that produced them, and the performances that set a standard for all future stagings. George structures the discussion around several important companies. He begins with Os Comediantes, whose revolutionary 1943 staging of Nelson Rodrigues' Vestido de Noiva (Bridal Gown) broke with the outmoded comedy-of-manners formula that had dominated the national stage since the nineteenth century. He considers three companies of the 1950s and 1960s—Teatro Brasileiro de Comédia, Teatro de Arena, and Teatro Oficina—along with the 1967 production of O Rei da Vela (The Candle King) by Teatro Oficina. The 1970s represented a wasteland for Brazilian theatre, George finds, in which a repressive military dictatorship muzzled artistic expression. The Grupo Macunaíma brought theatre alive again in the 1980s, with its productions of Macunaíma and Nelson 2 Rodrigues. Common to all theatrical companies, George concludes, was the desire to establish a national aesthetic, free from European and United States models. The creative tension this generated and the successes of modern Brazilian theatre make lively reading for all students of Brazilian and world drama.

Drama. Latino/Latina Studies. Translated from the Portuguese by various. The 2nd Edition of THREE CONTEMPORARY BRAZILIAN PLAYS reintroduces three of Brazil's most dynamic and gifted playwrights to the English-speaking audience. Plinio Marcos' Two Lost in the Filthy Night shows language as the only possession of two paupers living in claustrophobic conditions. The rapid and vigorous dialogue lashes out, enclosing the reader in a brutal game. Leilah Assumpcao, in Moist Lips, Quiet Passion, dramatizes the sexual life of a couple trying to achieve their Big Orgasm. They remember their frustrating games by the dates of the military coups. Existence is possible only through games. In Walking Papers by Consuleo de Castro, a man and a woman interact in fragmented situations bordering on insanity. There is no reference to socio-political events, but the obsessive language and the exacerbating rituals of the claustrophobic relationship projects the shadow of the repressive system.

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.

" 'A camera in the hand and ideas in the head' was the primary axiom of the young originators of Brazil's Cinema Novo. This movement of the 1960s and early 1970s overcame technical constraints and produced films on minimal budgets. In Allegories of Underdevelopment, Ismail Xavier examines a number of these films, arguing that they served to represent a nation undergoing a political and social transformation into modernity. Its best-known voice, filmmaker Glauber Rocha claimed that Cinema Novo was driven by an "aesthetics of hunger." This scarcity of means demanded new cinematic approaches that eventually gave rise to a legitimate and unique Third World cinema. Xavier stands in the vanguard of scholars presenting and interpreting these revolutionary films - from the masterworks of Rocha to the groundbreaking experiments of Julio Bressane, Rogério Sganzerla, Andrea Tonacci and Arthur Omar - to an English-speaking audience. Focusing on each filmmaker's use of narrative allegories for the "conservative modernization" Brazil and other nations underwent in the 1960s and 1970s, Xavier asks questions relating to the connection between film and history. He examines the way Cinema Novo transformed Brazil's cultural memory and charts the controversial roles that Marginal Cinema and Tropicalism played in this process. Among the films he discusses are Black God, White Devil, Land in Anguish, Red Light Bandit, Macunaíma, Antônio das Mortes, The Angel Is Born, and Killed the Family and Went to the Movies." -- Book cover.

"Gender is an absolute ground zero for most human societies," writes David William Foster, "an absolute horizon of social subjectivity." In this book, he examines gender issues in thirteen Brazilian films made (with one exception) after the 1985 return to constitutional democracy and elimination of censorship to show how these issues arise from and comment on the sociohistorical reality of contemporary Brazilian society. Foster organizes his study around three broad themes: construction of masculinity, constructions of feminine and feminist identities, and same-sex positionings and social power. Within his discussions of individual films ranging from Jorge um brasileiro to A hora da estrela to Beijo no asfalto, he offers new ways of understanding national ideals and stereotypes, sexual dissidence (homoeroticism and transgenderism), heroic models, U.S./Brazilian relations, revolutionary struggle, and human rights violations. As the first study of Brazilian cinematic representations of gender ideology in English or Portuguese, this book will be important reading in film and cultural studies.

Brazil has one of the most vibrant theater cultures in the world, home to a wide variety of theatrical expression. This collection of 15 interviews includes some of the country's most prolific creative minds--Ze Celso (Teatro Oficina), Antunes Filho, Gerald Thomas, Nos do Morro, Rudolfo Vasquez (Os Satyros), Antonio Araujo (Teatro Vertigem), Enrique Diaz (Cia do Atores) and Lia Rodrigues, to name a few--discussing their approaches to the collaborative theater process. They describe a collective creative environment in which practitioners are concerned with fundamental questions about social, cultural and artistic contexts in which productions are staged, and the interdisciplinary climate that predominated from the beginning of the 1980s.