Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Emperor of China, the Mute Canary & the Executioner of Peru

The Emperor of China, the Mute Canary & the Executioner of Peru

Ribemont-Dessaignes, Georges
Butterfield, Christopher

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ISBN10: 1939663059
ISBN13: 9781939663054
Publisher: Wakefield Pr
Published: Jan 31 2015
Pages: 264
Weight: 1.30
Height: 0.90 Width: 6.00 Depth: 8.90
Language: English
This volume collects three savage plays from the man André Breton designated as one of the only true Dadas (alongside Tristan Tzara and Francis Picabia): The Emperor of China (1916), The Mute Canary (1920) and The Executioner of Peru (1928). The first two have long been acknowledged as highpoints in the Dada movement's contribution to the theater, but in their brutal depictions of violent sexuality and nightmarish tyranny, and their casts of manipulative bureaucrats, murderous henchmen, insane dictators, lascivious virgins, Ubuesque cuckolds and nonsense-spewing enigmas, these plays also echo the work of such other dissident surrealists of the era as Georges Bataille and André Masson. These unsettling theatrical works were significant anticipations of Antonin Artaud's Theater of Cruelty and the Theater of the Absurd of the 1960s.

Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes (1884-1974) was a French writer and artist, and one of the fiercest adherents of the Paris Dada movement, acting as the group's secretary, and for which he authored some of its most vitriolic texts. Disenchanted with the Surrealist movement that followed, Ribemont-Dessaignes allied himself instead with such other Surrealist dissidents as René Daumal and the Grand Jeu. Throughout his long life, Ribemont-Dessaignes authored a sizable oeuvre of novels, plays, poetry, essays and memoirs, none of which has to date been translated into English.

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