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"Avant garde" has become a ubiquitous label, eclectically applied to any type of art that is anti-traditional in form. At its simplest, the term is sometimes taken to describe what is new at any given time: the leading edge of artistic experiment, which is continually outdated by the next step forward.
C.D. INNES, Avant Garde Theatre: 1892-1992
Avant-garde theatre, with its distrust of the individual (that bourgeois invention), tends to go beyond [character] and the psychological approach in search of a syntax of types and characters which are "deconstructed and post-individual."
PATRICE PAVIS, Dictionary of the Theatre
The avant-garde no longer simply attempts, as it always must, to carry out transformations within an inherited medium; it claims it is creating a medium of its own, sometimes retaining the old name of theatre, sometimes preferring others: spectacle, show, performance.
JEAN ALTER, A Sociosemiotic Theory of Theatre
Theatre is not and should not be a literary form of expression. A theatrical celebration can take place anywhere: out of doors, in a garage, in a stable. The problem with avant-garde theatre today is that it is absolutely intellectual. You have to be cerebrally inclined to understand what is going on.
JEROME SAVARY, quoted in James Roose Evans' Experimental Theatre
The avant-garde understands itself as invading unknown territory, exposing itself to the dangers of sudden, shocking encounters, conquering an as yet unoccupied future ... The avant-garde must find a direction in a landscape into which no one seems to have yet ventured.
JURGEN HABERMAS, "Modernity versus Postmodernity," Modernity: Critical Concepts
I do not like the Broadway theatre because it does not know how to say hello. The tone of voice is false, the mannerisms are false, the sex is false, ideal, the Hollywood world of perfection, the clean image, the well pressed clothes, the well scrubbed anus, odorless, inhuman, of the Hollywood actor, the Broadway star. And the terrible false dirt of Broadway, the lower depths in which the dirt is imitated, inaccurate.
The postmodern avant garde strips the idea of "modernism" itself of its assumed univocality, its consistency as a period style.
MICK WALLIS, Drama/Theatre/Performance
More than one branch of the avant-garde, claiming to break with the bourgeois vision and mode of production, remains tied to it in spite of its denials and ex-communications. We are far from having overcome bourgeois thought or practices, despite the socialist "intermission" between the Russian revolution and the collapse of the Berlin wall. The avant-garde has lost its radical nature. On the other hand, "bourgeois theatre" is sometimes subtle enough to flirt with the avant-garde or to make "intelligent boulevard theatre."
PATRICE PAVIS, Dictionary of the Theatre
I think we can regard the past eighty or so years in the arts ... not as a series of islands with names ending in ism, but as forming a still little-explored continent whose jagged coastline we have begun to leave astern without knowing whether the land is habitable.
ROGER SHATTUCK, introduction, The History of Surrealism
On the surface the avant garde as a whole seems united primarily in terms of what they are against: the rejection of social institutions and established artistic conventions, or antagonism towards the public (as representative of the existing order). By contrast any positive programme tends to be claimed as exclusive property by isolated and even mutually antagonistic sub-groups. So modern art appears fragmented and sectarian, defined as much by manifestos as imaginative work.
C.D. INNES, Avant Garde Theatre: 1892-1992
In academic studies of the avant-garde, the minuet of vanguard and cop has twirled to a very specific tune: the sad, often nostalgic strains of the eulogy. There is probably no other field of study that must contend so often with declarations that its object is defunct.
MIKE SELL, Avant-Garde Performance & the Limits of Criticism
Anti-art theater practitioners ... seek a freedom that brings a more ontologically fluid immediacy to the events in the theater. For this avant-garde, theater is not so much the realization of a fixed work constituted through performance as the unfolding of a unique event.
DAVID GRAVER, The Aesthetics of Disturbance
A substantial part of avant-garde art, guided by the genre of the manifesto, was not meant to be contemplated in private ... its screeching voice upsets our close-reading sensibilities.
MARTIN PUCHNER, "Screeching Voices: Avant-Garde Manifestos in the Cabaret"
Avant-garde theatre has a long and distinguished history of employing performance to ignite the conscience of an ethical observer.
TIM ETCHELLS, Certain Fragments
In avant garde drama ... primitivism goes hand in hand with aesthetic experimentation designed to advance the technical progress of the art itself by exploring fundamental questions: What is a theatre? What is a play? What is an actor? What is a spectator? What is the relation between them all? What conditions serve this best?
C.D. INNES, Avant Garde Theatre: 1892-1992
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- In this collection of plays, Walter Wykes creates a series of modern myths, tapping into something in the strata of the subconscious, through ritualism and rich, poetic language. The worlds he creates are brand new and hilarious, yet each contains an ancient horror we all know and cannot escape and have never been able to hang one definitive word on.