Contours of the Theatrical Avant-garde: Performance and TextualityJames Martin Harding University of Michigan Press, 2000 - 301 pages This collection of essays explores the development of avant-garde theater and its relation to questions of textuality, authority, and the academy. Although the canon of modern and contemporary drama would be difficult to imagine without the influential legacy of the movements and strands of the historical avant-garde, this critical history is often overlooked in courses on modern and contemporary drama and theater. Though primarily focusing on issues of textuality and performance, the essays regard the antitextualism of the avant-garde as indicative of the wide variety of anti-cultural sentiments that have characterized avant-garde performance. The volume begins with the anti-textual sentiments of the avant-garde, then offers antitextual models, explores specific performances, and ends with a critical analysis of the avant-garde. Uniting the array of opinions articulated is a belief that despite the problems that haunt the traditions of avant-garde theater, it can nonetheless offer continued valuable insights into the industries of literature, theater, scholarship, and culture. James M. Harding is Assistant Professor of English, Mary Washington College. He is author of Adorno and a "Writing of the Ruins." |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Text and Antitext in the Historical AvantGarde | 13 |
Performance Practices of the Modernist AvantGarde | 15 |
Antonin Artaud and the Authority of Text Spectacle and Performance | 43 |
The Language of AvantGarde Experiment | 58 |
Theorizing Antitext and Beyond | 77 |
The AvantGarde and the Semiotics of the Antitextual Gesture | 79 |
Which Theories for Which MiseenScènes? | 96 |
Textual Spaces Theatrical Spaces and AvantGarde Performance | 155 |
Text Commodity Happenings | 157 |
Radical Art Revolutionary Stages and AvantGarde Divisions | 176 |
An Interview with Richard Schechner | 202 |
Reflections on the Institutions of the AvantGarde | 215 |
A Hidden History of University Patronage in the United States | 217 |
Feminist Performance Art AvantGardes and Probity | 239 |
| 291 | |
The Music of the Future? | 110 |
Leaky Texts Parasited Performances and Maxwellian Academons | 130 |
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action actors aesthetic Allan Kaprow American Antonin Artaud Artaud artists audience authority avant avant-garde performance avant-garde theater Barrault Bauhaus Beck become Black Mountain Black Mountain College Body as Membrane bourgeois Brecht Cabaret Cage Cage's Carolee Schneemann censor century classical concept context conventional created criticism cultural Dada drama dynamic entropy essay feminist Fluxus formance function futurist garde George Brecht gesture Happenings historical avant-garde Ibid institutions John Cage Judith Malina Julian Beck Justesen Kaprow kind literary literature Living Theatre Maciunas Maciunas's mance means ment metaphor Michael Kirby mise-en-scène movement neo-avant-garde notion objects occupation Odéon original Orlan Paris performance art performance groups Peter Bürger physical piece play political practices probity production Rabelais Rabelais's radical representation Richard Schechner ritual Schechner Schneemann score script social space spectacle spectators stage textual theatrical theory tion tradition trans transformation University Press visual women words writing York