Ahistorical Avant-Gardism and the Theater

Abstract

Critics and scholars have been debating the origins, definitions and continued validity of the avant-garde since the early twentieth century. Theoretical arguments have postulated the death of the avant-garde; to counter them, critical claims have cited the ever-present avant-garde tendencies in contemporary theater and art. Although the avant-garde has undergone radical shifts in the second half of the twentieth century, it remains a viable, practical concept in theater as it manifests a pervasive impulse to push aesthetic boundaries. To amend Mark Twain’s famous adage, then, “reports of the avant-garde’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.” Declarations of its death are founded on the presumption of an idyllic moment in history—the time of the “historic Western avant-garde”—in which socially, politically and aesthetically subversive theater stood diametrically opposed to mainstream culture. In fact, such an era might never have truly existed. Instead, if we see the avant-garde as an “allowed fool,” the embodiment of a subversive impulse that mainstream culture permits to exist on its edges, we can gauge the vitality of the avant-garde as a question of location rather than existence. The avant-garde never dies; it merely shifts its place from the extreme edge of the mainstream to a spectrum of slightly more “respectable” places within the mainstream. The avant-garde thus becomes a repeating phenomenon with a nonlinear life, which moves in cycles and is not limited to a single geographic region like Europe.