Total Theater and the Missing Pieces of the Brazilian Avant-Garde

In the fall of 1933, the avant-garde scene in São Paulo was abuzz with talk of the new Teatro da Experiência, trumpeted as the most radical theater experiment the country had yet seen. On the program for the inaugural event was O Homem e o Cavalo (Man and the Horse), a "Spectacle in Nine Tableaux" by the notorious poet, novelist, and provocateur Oswald de Andrade. It was an ambitious undertaking for a group of amateurs: the dramatic action ranged from St. Peter's pearly gates to a Soviet tribunal, while its huge cast of characters included Cleopatra, talking horses, Madame Jesus, the Voice of Stalin, Fu-Man-Chu, and a Poet-Soldier who casually announces Hitler's imminent genocide of the Jews. As fate would have it, the author failed to finish the script in time, and the theater opened instead with O Bailado do Deus Morto (Dance of the Dead God), a ritualistic performance piece composed by director Flávio de Carvalho and performed by a cast that included black actors and musicians. On 17 November 1933, the day after an entire battalion of police officers showed up uninvited for the third performance, the premises were shut down and placed under armed guard. The Teatro da Experiência became a mere anecdote in avant-garde lore, O Homem e o Cavalo never made its debut, and the might-have-been revolutionary masses never got their chance to witness the grand spectacle of world history on a small São Paulo stage.

What exactly did they miss? The eminent theater critic Sábato Magaldi echoed a sentiment shared by many latter-day critics and theater practitioners in Brazil when he wrote that O Homem e o Cavalo represented Oswald de Andrade's most ambitious attempt to create a kind of "total theater"—a visionary project that, "by virtue of being at the forefront of its era, doesn't even seem to belong to the reality of Brazilian theater."² From the vantage point of the present, Oswald's drama appears to be the harbinger of a theatrical revolution that never happened, the missing piece of an avant-garde movement that shook the foundations of literature, music, art, and architecture but left the nineteenth-century stage intact. Magaldi and others insist that Oswald's unrealized plan for a "stadium theater" that would bridge the gap between art and action betrays many of the same aesthetic and political preoccupations as Max Reinhardt's expressionist experiments, Erwin Piscator's TotalTheater, and the constructivist montages of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Vsevolod Meyerhold. Invoking a discourse that remains endemic to critical accounts of the European and Euro-American avant-garde, they celebrate O Homem as a valiant effort to mobilize the masses by blending popular performance traditions with the erudite genres of the elite and opening up the hallowed halls of bourgeois theater to new artistic media such as film to create a performance that would be nothing less than "total."

In what follows, I reverse the terms of this interpretation by examining the elusive ideal of total theater through the optic of Oswald de Andrade's ill-fated spectacle and the events that led up to its non-performance. My reading situates O Homem e o Cavalo in the local and global political landscape of the 1930s, placing it at the juncture of a triangular relationship formed by the new media of mass culture, the expansion of the modern state, and the appearance of ideological rifts within a group of intellectuals who were identified as the artistic avant-garde. At the outset, it is important to clarify a point that discussions of total theater all too often obscure: not all totalities are alike. Indeed, I argue that in bringing the aesthetic paradigm of total theater head-to-head with a historical narrative of imperialism, O Homem e o Cavalo redeploys many of the formal processes associated with the avant-garde—the reconfiguration of scenic space, abstraction, technological mediation—in order to posit a very different model of art and its relationship to political agency...