American Avant Garde Theatre

American Avant Garde Theatre
Author: Arnold Aronson
Publsiher: Routledge
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2014-01-02
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9781136370762

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This stunning contribution to the field of theatre history is the first in-depth look at avant-garde theatre in the United States from the early 1950s to the 1990s. American Avant-Garde Theatre offers a definition of the avant-garde, and looks at its origins and theoretical foundations by examining: *Gertrude Stein *John Cage *The Beat writers *Avant-garde cinema *Abstract Expressionism *Minimalism There are fascinating discussions and illustrations of the productions of the Living Theatre, the Wooster Group, Open Theatre, Ontological-Hysteric Theatre and Performance Group. among many others. Aronson also examines why avant-garde theatre declined and virtually disappeared at the end of the twentieth century.

Mama Dada

Mama Dada
Author: Sarah Bay-Cheng
Publsiher: Routledge
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2004-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781135924164

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Mama Dada is the first book to examine Gertrude Stein's drama within the history of the theatrical and cinematic avant-gardes. Since the publication of Stein's major writings by the Library of America in 1998, interest in her dramatic writing has escalated, particularly in American avant-garde theaters. This book addresses the growing interest in Stein's theater by offering the first detailed analyses of her major plays, and by considering them within a larger history of avant-garde performance. In addition to comparing Stein's plays and theories to those generated by Dadaists, Surrealists, and Futurists, this study further explores the uniqueness of Stein via these theatrical movements, including discussions of her interest in American life and drama, which argues that a significant and heretofore unrecognized relationship exists among the histories of avant-garde drama, cinema, and homosexuality. By examining and explaining the relationship among these three histories, the dramatic writings of Stein can best be understood, not only as examples of literary modernism, but also as influential dramatic works that have had a lasting effect on the American theatrical avant-

Site Specific Art

Site Specific Art
Author: Nick Kaye
Publsiher: Routledge
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2013-04-15
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9781134665945

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Site-Specific Art charts the development of an experimental art form in an experimental way. Nick Kaye traces the fascinating historical antecedents of today's installation and performance art, while also assembling a unique documentation of contemporary practice around the world. The book is divided into individual analyses of the themes of space, materials, site, and frames. These are interspersed by specially commissioned documentary artwork from some of the world's foremost practitioners and artists working today. This interweaving of critique and creativity has never been achieved on this scale before. Site-Specific Art investigates the relationship of architectural theory to an understanding of contemporary site related art and performance, and rigorously questions how such works can be documented. The artistic processes involved are demonstrated through entirely new primary articles from: * Meredith Monk * Station House Opera * Brith Gof * Forced Entertainment. This volume is an astonishing contribution to debates around experimental cross-arts practice.

Avant garde Performance the Limits of Criticism

Avant garde Performance   the Limits of Criticism
Author: Mike Sell
Publsiher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2008
Genre: Avant-garde (Aesthetics)
ISBN: 9780472033072

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Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism looks at the American avant-garde during the Cold War period, focusing on the interrelated questions of performance practices, cultural resistance, and the politics of criticism and scholarship in the U.S. counterculture. This groundbreaking book examines the role of the scholar and critic in the cultural struggles of radical artists and reveals how avant-garde performance identifies the very limits of critical consideration. It also explores the popularization of the avant-garde: how formerly subversive art is eventually discovered by the mass media, is gobbled up by the marketplace, and finds its way onto the syllabi of college and university courses. This book is a timely and significant book that will appeal to those interested in avant-garde literary criticism, theater history, and performance studies.

Cutting Performances

Cutting Performances
Author: James M. Harding
Publsiher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2010-02-25
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780472117185

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Sheds light on the critical role that women artists have played in the evolution of the American avant-garde

The Unfinished Art of Theater

The Unfinished Art of Theater
Author: Sarah J. Townsend
Publsiher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 443
Release: 2018-07-15
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780810137424

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A certain idea of the avant-garde posits the possibility of a total rupture with the past. The Unfinished Art of Theater pulls back on this futuristic impulse by showing how theater became a key site for artists on the semiperiphery of capitalism to reconfigure the role of the aesthetic between 1917 and 1934. The book argues that this “unfinished art”—precisely because of its historic weakness as a representative institution in Mexico and Brazil, where the bourgeois stage had not (yet) coalesced—was at the forefront of struggles to redefine the relationship between art and social change. Drawing on extensive archival research, Sarah J. Townsend reveals the importance of projects and texts that belie the rhetoric of rupture and immediacy associated with the avant-garde: ethnographic operas with ties to the recording industry, populist puppet plays, children’s radio programs about the wonders of technology, a philosophical drama about the birth of a new race, and an antifascist spectacle written for (but never performed at) a theater shut down by the police. Ultimately, the book makes the case that the very category of avant-garde art is bound up in the experience of dependency, delay, and the uneven development of capitalism.

Richard Foreman

Richard Foreman
Author: Neal Swettenham
Publsiher: Routledge
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2017-11-10
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9781351594967

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Richard Foreman has been writing, directing and designing avant-garde theatre in New York since he first founded his Ontological-Hysteric company there in 1968. In all that time, few directors have taken up the challenge of staging his problematic, rewarding texts, and Foreman's work remains under-explored by other practitioners. Richard Foreman: An American (Partly) in Paris argues that Foreman can productively be viewed as a (partly) European artist, whose thinking and theatre-making have been radically shaped by contact with Europe. Through a detailed account of his European productions, interviews with Foreman himself, a set of practical strategies for staging the plays and the full text of Foreman's previously unpublished play Georges Bataille’s Bathrobe (1983), Neal Swettenham introduces the director’s work to a new generation of readers and theatre-makers.

Looking Into the Abyss

Looking Into the Abyss
Author: Arnold Aronson
Publsiher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2005
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0472068881

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Engaging essays by an internationally prominent historian and theorist of theater set design