Avant-Garde Performance

The volume examines the performance aesthetics of four major art movements—Expressionism, Futurism, Dadaism, and Constructivism. After outlining the origins and general characteristics of the historical avant-garde, this study offers detailed coverage of key performances undertaken by artists, usually outside the conventional theatre environment. Günter Berghaus identifies paths and trajectories through a complex artistic terrain, often referred to as “Art Performances,” and surveys trends and events that had a fundamental influence on the development of a modern theatre practice.

The avant-garde has been criticized for being too commercial to be avant-garde, not commercial enough to further the cause of the avant- garde, and too self-indulgent to make a statement. Rather than focusing on the controversies that inevitably are heaped on the challenging, Berghaus (theater, U. of Bristol) describes the antecedents and reasons for the very concepts behind the avant-garde, its genesis within modernity, the earliest performance practices up to 1919, and transition from late modernism to postmodernism, and the beginning of the avant-garde in the USA and Japan. He then tackles the performances themselves, ranging from body art, ritualism and neo-shamanism to video and multimedia and the rise of the avant-garde in cyberspace. Annotation ©2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Günter Berghaus is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bristol. He has held positions at the University of Rio de Janeiro and at Brown University and has published over a dozen books and a large number of articles on avant-garde performance, theatre anthropology, dance history, and Renaissance and Baroque theatre. He has directed numerous plays from the classical and modern repertoire and holds research awards from the Polish Academy of Sciences, the German Research Foundation, the Italian Ministry of Culture, the British Academy, and the Brazilian Ministry of Education.