Malazarte: a estética simbolista na estreia de uma peça de circunstância em Paris (1911)

Résumé

This work is the result of bibliographic and documentary research carried out in the Digital Collection of Newspapers and Magazines of the Hemeroteca Digital of the National Library of Rio de Janeiro (BNDigital) about the premiere and repercussion of the show Malazarte, a figure from Brazilian folklore that Graça Aranha became the protagonist in his theatrical text published in 1911, in French and Portuguese. With the premiere of the show in 1911, Graça Aranha intended to consolidate himself as a representative of pre-modernism in Europe, as the first representations of Malazarte were performed by a French company, for a select audience in Paris. The historiography of Brazilian theater has explored little about the premiere and repercussion of the aforementioned show, however, contact with the chronicles and reviews of Brazilian newspapers at the time instigated the investigation and it was found that Malazarte was a show designed and favored to meet the demands for philosophical and aesthetic transformations of the political and cultural turn in Europe in the first decades of the 20th century, due to Graça Aranha's relations with the European cultural milieu. Such aspects configured Malazarte as a circumstance play and its staging as a laboratory for symbolist experiments.