Alejo Carpentier’s Ballet Librettos

doi:10.1017/9781009554824.013

Chapter 12 - Alejo Carpentier’s Ballet Librettos

Eclectic Avant-gardism and Vicarious Spectatorship

from Part II - The Polymath

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2026

Lester Tomé

Edited by

Anke Birkenmaier

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Anke Birkenmaier: Affiliation:
Indiana University

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Summary

For his 1920s ballet librettos, Alejo Carpentier drew inspiration from the groundbreaking spectacles that ensembles such as Les Ballets Russes produced in Europe during the avant-garde era, even though he had not witnessed those theatrical productions. Rather, he experienced them from afar – as a vicarious spectator – in the act of reading texts about them. Carpentier approached the ballet libretto as an eclectic and experimental literary genre in which to explore his wide-ranging intellectual interests: in various styles of avant-garde art, music and theatre (from Futurism to Jean Cocteau’s poetics of the commonplace), as well as in politics, Afro-Cuban culture and ethnography. Although he held no direct contact with the artists creating experimental ballets in Europe and elsewhere in Latin America, he saw them and himself as forming an international community – which illustrates the extent to which the transatlantic and hemispheric networks of the avant-garde operated as imagined communities.

Keywords

Alejo Carpentier Ballet Avant-gardism Libretto Afrocubanismo Futurism Spectatorship Jean Cocteau Imagined communities Cuba

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Type: Chapter
Information: Alejo Carpentier in Context , pp. 140 - 153
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009554824.013 [Opens in a new window]
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2026

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References

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