quotations about avant-garde theatre
Ionesco rejects the idea that the avant-garde theater is transitional, for all theater is transitional. Instead he sees the avant-garde as a restoration, a return. It constitutes a rediscovery of the fundamental models of theater, a return in some respects to primitive theater, and a return to man, rather than society, as the center of the dramatic universe.
LEONARD CABELL PRONKO
Avant-garde: The Experimental Theater in France
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
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
Now that avant-garde is commercial, and the fringe mainstream, producing a genuinely profound experience through surrealism is a challenge.
CAMERON WOODHEAD
"Review: Jet Of Blood", The Age, September 25, 2006
It has been said that avant-garde is simply doing the opposite of whatever is in style. Something that is iconoclastic is not necessarily good, and we shouldn't feel pressured into showering it with praise for fear of being labelled plebeian and uncultured.
CHRISTINA KENNEDY
"On the Stage: Miss Julie", Business Day Live, October 30, 2016
The great creative talents of past centuries relied on the occasional patron and on naked commercial appeal. Arts Council people say that if we returned to those days we would never see anything 'edgy' in art. Rubbish. The avant-garde is the most likely part of the market to appeal to self-promoting patrons. Anyway, why should an Arts Council concentrate so much on the new and exploratory. Is that what taxpayers want?
QUENTIN LETTS
"Squealing luvvies, rich whiteys and why the arts CAN take a haircut without civilisation falling", Daily Mail, April 1, 2011
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
My position on the avant garde is rather than if there is something like dark matter in the universe it can't only exist at the so-called bottom and middle of the system but must be found in some measure in all the spaces of the system, otherwise why would those who are not so well-known or acknowledged even be inspired to carry on as slaves to culture.
MARC JAMES LEGER
"Nina Zivancevic Unveils the Underground", The End of Being, May 21, 2015