Sport in Artur Azevedo's Revues: A Reflection of Developments in Late 19th Century Rio de Janeiro Society (Essay‪)‬

In this article, we have no intention of discussing inter-semiotic dialogues or the similarities and dissimilarities that can be identified between the languages of 'sport' and 'theatre', issues that have been addressed by authors such as Schechner (34), Welsch (145) and Gumbrecht (15). Our goal is to explore how in a specific location and period, the city of Rio de Janeiro in the final years of the 19th century, the major Brazilian playwright Artur Azevedo made sport an important theme in plays deeply rooted in that society. During the last twenty-five years of the 19th century, Rio de Janeiro, at that time Brazil's Federal Capital, underwent rapid changes as its inhabitants searched for ways to relate to the global, mainly European, changes that characterized the development of the ideas and imagination of the movement we now describe as 'modernity'. Economically, the abolition of slavery (1) in 1888 was a key turning point; the country was also taking its first steps in the process of industrialization, although the policy of basing the economy on the export of agricultural products was reaffirmed. Politically, Brazil transitioned from a monarchy to a Constitutional Presidential Republic in 1889.