Document Type
Thesis
Date of Degree Completion
Spring 2015
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
Theatre Studies
Committee Chair
John A. Ball
Second Committee Member
Lene Pedersen
Third Committee Member
Scott Robinson
Abstract
The dominant narrative of the Living Theatre, an anarchist-pacifist, activist performance group, situates the company within a historical framework of the "New Left". Implications of this strategy are identified and critiqued. Both due to the simplification of historical time periods between the fields of theatre and politics, or "periodization" (Postlewait), and because of the ways in which the "New Left" is identified as overtly American in much theatre scholarship, historicizing the Living Theatre as "in-line" with the New Left has resulted in the erasure of the Living Theatre's founding philosophies of anarchism and pacifism. The visual implications of these findings are discussed in the theatre's advertising campaign for a 1971 lecture tour titled, "Theatre and the Revolution". Although a project engaged in marketing revolutionary ideas, these posters drew their image vocabulary from imaging strategies on the more far-radical left, such as Mao, Guevara, and Stalin. Visual-rhetorical strategy during this time period is compared across two advertising images.
Recommended Citation
Roberts, Chelsea R., "Anarchist Strategy and Visual Rhetoric in Brazil, 1970: The Living Theatre as “The People in the Street”" (2015). All Master's Theses. 225.
https://digitalcommons.cwu.edu/etd/225
Language
English
Included in
Advertising and Promotion Management Commons, Art and Materials Conservation Commons, Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory Commons, Latin American History Commons, Political History Commons, Theatre History Commons