The Vanguard of Avant-Garde
I'm not sure if the title of this post does not have overly much with it's content, I just like the sound of it. Two words, two languages, same literal meaning when it comes to military strategy, describing the group of soldiers leading the charge into the enemy lines who are therefore the most likely to get killed. For an artist to adopt the title for their self when not actually in danger seems to cheapen the violence of being the first to die for king and country, taking a pike to the liver on the fields of Agincourt on an ill advised campaign to reclaim some farms. I suppose, therefore, that there is an argument to be made that the true avant-garde artists (avant-gartists) are the ones performing art in highly unsafe locations. Like those performers who were arrested and sent to the gulag only to continue performing in the gulag. Or the guy who walked a tight rope twixt the Twin Towers, Phillipe Petite, whose name belies his grand escapade. But even then one can see the difference tween these two types of danger: one was undertook for political reasons, the other for hubris.
All of this is to say that I personally have witnessed no Avant-Garde theater of the moment. I have seen Avant-Garde of the past, in Beckett's Not I. I have seen Shakespeare performed in prisons by Minnesota's Ten Thousand Things. Perhaps the next 10,000 times I audition for them they will cast me, but I digress. Both of these are boundary pushers but it was really Not I that got me. I absolutely hated that play when I saw it, but I LOVED it when I picked it up and read it. I am not an auditory learner at all and so when I am bombarded with a bajillion words at one time about two of them stick. In the case of Not I the two words were: No and She. Thrilling stuff...
But then I picked it up to read and boy oh boy did it tickle my postmodern English major sensibilities. It is my understanding that scholarship generally considers him the last Modernist, but this particular piece, written in 1972, bears all the hallmarks of linguistic postmodernism. The anxious relationship between word and meaning is teased out thrillingly in the text, and lord help me I love testing the boundaries of written language. If LSU let's me have my way, my graduate thesis is going to be a performance based on this similar tactic to this and The Skriker. I've already written a bunch of it so... here's hoping.
Anyway, the avant-garde, in it's fleetingness, is hard to pin down, but I believe studying it to be a highly useful endeavor for the MFA actor. I'm skeptical of it, because I find it takes a lot of energy to watch, but I hope I get to see some more of it.
All of this is to say that I personally have witnessed no Avant-Garde theater of the moment. I have seen Avant-Garde of the past, in Beckett's Not I. I have seen Shakespeare performed in prisons by Minnesota's Ten Thousand Things. Perhaps the next 10,000 times I audition for them they will cast me, but I digress. Both of these are boundary pushers but it was really Not I that got me. I absolutely hated that play when I saw it, but I LOVED it when I picked it up and read it. I am not an auditory learner at all and so when I am bombarded with a bajillion words at one time about two of them stick. In the case of Not I the two words were: No and She. Thrilling stuff...
But then I picked it up to read and boy oh boy did it tickle my postmodern English major sensibilities. It is my understanding that scholarship generally considers him the last Modernist, but this particular piece, written in 1972, bears all the hallmarks of linguistic postmodernism. The anxious relationship between word and meaning is teased out thrillingly in the text, and lord help me I love testing the boundaries of written language. If LSU let's me have my way, my graduate thesis is going to be a performance based on this similar tactic to this and The Skriker. I've already written a bunch of it so... here's hoping.
Anyway, the avant-garde, in it's fleetingness, is hard to pin down, but I believe studying it to be a highly useful endeavor for the MFA actor. I'm skeptical of it, because I find it takes a lot of energy to watch, but I hope I get to see some more of it.
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