The Programs of the Municipal Theater of São Paulo: Theater and Society in a Peripheral Modernity (1911-1922)

ABSTRACT In this article we propose a discussion about the use by the historian of a kind of document very little studied until now: the theater programs. Our study is based on the analysis of about 200 programs of performances that took place in the Municipal Theater of São Paulo between 1911 and 1922, an iconic theater and a monument of an era marked by a great economic development of the city and a fast urban growing. By the analysis of the physical and visual aspects of the programs, and their contents also, we propose an interpretation of the meaning of the theater in this new modernity that reaches this city where the vestiges of the colonial past are disappearing quickly.