Francisco Nieva and Postmodernist Theatre


Book Description

Francisco Nieva and Postmodernist Theatre will engage with and advance the debate on the viability of postmodernist theatre in general by presenting the works of Francisco Nieva as a bona-fide postmodernist theatre formulated on avant-garde foundations.The study will also redefine the existing historical boundaries of literary postmodernism by asserting Spain's role in shaping that history through the 1940s neo-avant-garde Movement, Postismo. The author argues that Postismo is the earliest systematic manifestation in the Iberian Peninsula of literary postmodernism as we know it, a fact often ignored on account of Franco's suppression of it, and that Nieva is not only Postismo's chief proponent but also the only legitimate postist playwright.




Francisco Nieva: Coronada y el toro


Book Description

Coronada y el toro (Coronada and the Bull) is a play written in 1974 by Francisco Morales Nieva (1924–2016), a prominent figure in the history of Spanish theatre. Even though the aesthetic quality of his drama competed with that of his contemporaries, with many of whom he interacted (Ionesco, Genet, Brecht, Grotowski, et al.), Nieva’s recognition was unduly delayed within Spain and, on the international scene, his name remains eclipsed by playwrights such as Federico García Lorca and Antonio Buero Vallejo. Traditionalist and populist yet cosmopolitan and neo-avant-garde, Nieva began writing plays in the late 1940s but never got the chance to perform any on the commercial stage until 1976, a few months after the death of General Francisco Franco, whose censorship machine forced his work underground. Hard to subject to any single classification, Nieva’s theatre is as complex as it is innovative in its combination of resources from a wide range of artistic trends, from the género chico to the Baroque to postmodernism. Coronada y el toro is a sophisticated masterpiece, rich in intertextuality, humour, and suspense.




The Cultural Politics of Twentieth-century Spanish Theatre


Book Description

The Cultural Politics of Twentieth-Century Spanish Theater argues that twentieth-century artists used the Golden Age Eucharist plays called autos sacramentales to reassess the way politics and the arts interact in the Spanish nation's past and present, and to posit new ideas for future relations between the state and the national culture industry. The book traces the phenomenon of the twentieth-century auto to show how theater practitioners revisited this national genre to manifest different, oftentimes opposing, ideological and aesthetic agendas. It follows the auto from the avant-garde stagings and rewritings of the form in the early twentieth century, to the Francoist productions by the Teatro Nacional de la Falange, to postmodern parodies of the form in the era following Franco's death to demonstrate how twentieth-century Spanish dramatists use the auto in their reassessment of the nation's political and artistic past, and as a way of envisioning its future.




Spanish Theatre 1920 - 1995


Book Description

Beginning with a reassessment of the 1920s and 30s, this text looks beyond a consideration of just the most successful Spanish playwrights of the time, and discusses also the work of directors, theorists, actors and designers.




Cross-cultural Approaches to Theatre


Book Description

Provides a comprehensive view of the interrelationship between Spain and France, with emphasis on the 1970s and 1980s.




'Other' Spanish Theatres


Book Description

'Other' Spanish Theatres challenges established opinions on modern Iberian theatre through a consideration of the roles of contrasting figures and companies who have impacted upon both the practice and the perception of Spanish and European stages. In this broad and detailed study, Delgado selects six subjects which map out alternative readings of a nation's theatrical innovation through the last century. These six subjects include Margarita Xirgu, Enrique Rambal, María Casarest and Nuria Espert.




Theatre Censorship in Spain, 19311985


Book Description

This is a comprehensive study of the impact of censorship on theatre in twentieth-century Spain. It draws on extensive archival evidence, vivid personal testimonies and in-depth analysis of legislation to document the different kinds of theatre censorship practised during the Second Republic (1931–6), the civil war (1936–9), the Franco dictatorship (1939–75) and the transition to democracy (1975–85). Changes in criteria, administrative structures and personnel from these periods are traced in relation to wider political, social and cultural developments, and the responses of playwrights, directors and companies are explored. With a focus on censorship, new light is cast on particular theatremakers and their work, the conditions in which all kinds of theatre were produced, the construction of genres and canons, as well as on broader cultural history and changing ideological climate – all of which are linked to reflections on the nature of censorship and the relationship between culture and the state.




Reception and Renewal in Modern Spanish Theatre, 1939-1963


Book Description

The book constitutes the first attempt to provide an overview of the reception of foreign drama in Spain during the Franco dictatorship. John London analyses performance, stage design, translation, censorship, and critical reviews in relation to the works of many authors, including Noel Coward, Arthur Miller, Eugene Ionesco, and Samuel Beckett. He compares the original reception of these dramatists with the treatment they were given in Spain. However, his study is also a reassessment of the Spanish drama of the period. Dr London argues that only by tracing the reception of non-Spanish drama can we understand the praise lavished on playwrights such as Antonio Buero Vallejo and Alfonso Sastre, alongside the simultaneous rejection of Spanish avant-garde styles. A concluding reinterpretation of the early plays of Fernando Arrabal indicates the richness of an alternative route largely ignored in histories of Spanish theatre.




Postmodernity in Spanish Fiction and Culture


Book Description

"Postmodernity in Spanish Fiction and Culture" is a compelling study that combines elements of cultural studies and literary studies in order to present an integrated cultural representation of the emergence of a postmodern social constitution of contemporary Spain. Marking a sweeping reposition from earlier works about postmodernity and postmodernism in Spain, "Postmodernity in Spanish Fiction and Culture" makes a strong connection between postmodernity as social and economic conditions that are the result of unique features of a Spain of the 20th and 21st century, and postmodernism as life-style experiences that manifest new cultural and artistic practices of the 1980s and beyond. The study examines postmodernity by relating it to those exclusive social and cultural experiences that are patently Spanish (the movida, desencanto, immigration, globalization, and terrorism) and concludes that by virtue of Spain's unique socio-cultural, economic, and political history, not only does the country emerge as one of the most postmodern of all European nations but also that the conditions that define the country's evolution from the mid 1980s to the present constitute a distinctively authentic postmodernity.