Long ago, in mid-October, members of an Amazonian tribe discovered the Mediterranean. Having made the arduous journey across the Atlantic, the colonizers were fascinated by the strange peoples they encountered as they traveled around this newfound sea. Or so reports the narrator of Mauricio Kagel’s 1975 work of “sitting music theater,” Mare Nostrum: Discovery, Pacification and Conversion of the Mediterranean Region by a Tribe from Amazonia. Borrowing its title from the Imperial Roman name for the Mediterranean, “Our Sea,” Mare Nostrum is an operatic farce of European colonialism. Using the playful space of an imagined past, Kagel restages Latin American colonial legacies on the waters of the Mediterranean to meditate on power, violence, and the writing of history. This article employs theories of transnational experimentalisms to establish the centrality of mobility in Kagel’s work—a mobility, as the article argues, that is fundamental to the genre of experimental music theater. Themes of mobility suffuse Mare Nostrum, not only in the imaginative material of its dramatic plot, but in the work’s creative movement through music history and its play with iconic works of musical exoticism; in its entwinement with international networks of avant-garde performance; and in its portrayal of environmental devastation as a legacy of colonialism’s extractive structures. Reconsidering Mare Nostrum in light of urgent geopolitical crises of postcolonial and environmental violence, the article concludes with a provocation to reconceptualize the historiography of the mid-twentieth-century avant-garde with such works of experimental music theater at its center.

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