The pain of feeling like birds and not being able to sing: declaimers in the poetic universe of Alemany Villa

Abstract

At the beginning of the 20th century, the national theater went through a period of particular experimental intensity like other aesthetic phenomena of the moment (plastic, music, literature, cinematography, architecture). The scene began to harbor new aesthetic experiences that arose from the intersection between literary culture and entertainment. Among them is the art of declamation. This article focuses on the 1920s, a period in which this discipline undergoes a process of expansion and autonomization, thus leaving the school cloister to move to the theater scene. The sections “Intérpretes poéticos” and “Por el mundo de la declamación” of the cultural magazine Comoedia para todos (1926-1933) allow us to reconstruct the case of the Escuela Universal de Arte Universal, directed by Alemany Villa towards the middle of the first decade of the 20th century, until his death in 1931. The photographs and critical reviews of the poetic auditions published by the magazine reveal the contradictions surrounding the process of autonomizing this aesthetic practice. These are sources that illuminate the tensions between two orders of representation, the textual, typical of literary culture; and the visual, with the conformation of an entertainment industry.