After the Avant-Garde

In this installment of her After-the-Avant-Garde series, Kate Kremer looks at the parallel functions of the prompter in the chicken suit in Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s 2009 Romeo and Juliet and Br’er Rabbit in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ An Octoroon.

In this installation, Kate Kremer continues her exploration of durational theatre and what it has to do with realism.

In this installment, Kate Kremer discusses the difference between public and private space, and the kind of theatregoing experience one can have in situations with unfamiliar rules.

What conditions make life unlivable? Kate Kremer explores this question looking at performances by Forced Entertainment and Tehching Hsieh, ranging from six hours to one year.

The rise of artistic multi-functionalism, and the open, assimilative, and collaborative values it implies, has coincided with the emergence of devising as a major theatrical discipline. Although devising is hardly new the process of developing work through collaboration among a group of artists has gained traction in recent years. It makes sense: both multi-functionalism and devising are solutions to an economic downturn, ways to continue creating complex and multivalent art in a scale-back climate.

Whereas the old avant-garde was oriented toward an imagined future and engaged in a revolutionary project of overthrowing stale regimes and remaking art—and society—according to visionary principles, the new avant-garde is focused on the current moment.

There is a prevailing sense that the millennial avant-garde is not creating political, activist theatre to the same extent as the avant-garde of the ’60s and ’70s. I don’t think this is true. But I do think that the challenge has changed.

Writers and directors such as Robert Wilson, María Irene Fornes, Richard Foreman, Caryl Churchill, Elizabeth LeCompte, Judith Malina, Julian Beck, Peter Brook, Ed Bullins, and Joseph Chaikin challenged our notions of space and duration, meaning and eventfulness, theatricality and chance. They revolutionized our sense of what a play might be. That was their revolution. What is our avant-garde?