Avant Garde Theatre

1892–1992

Christopher Innes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134920884
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Examining the development of avant garde theatre from its inception in the 1890s right up to the present day, Christopher Innes exposes a central paradox of modern theatre; that the motivating force of theatrical experimentation is primitivism. What links the work of Strindberg, Artaud, Brook and Mnouchkine is an idealisation of the elemental and a desire to find ritual in archaic traditions. This widespread primitivism is the key to understanding both the political and aesthetic aspects of modern theatre and provides fresh insights into contemporary social trends.
The original text, first published in 1981 as Holy Theatre, has been fully revised and up-dated to take account of the most recent theoretical developments in anthropology, critical theory and psychotherapy. New sections on Heiner Muller, Robert Wilson, Eugenio Barba, Ariane Mnouchkine and Sam Shepard have been added. As a result, the book now deals with all the major avant garde theatre practitioners, in Europe and North America.
Avant Garde Theatre will be essential reading for anyone attempting to understand contemporary drama.

1: INTRODUCTION

THEMES AND DEFINITIONS

‘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taken to describe what is new at any given time: the leading edge of artistic experiment, which is continually outdated by the next step forward. But‘avant garde’ is by no means value-neutral, as such usage implies. For Marxist critics like George Lukács it became synonymous with decadence, a cultural symptom of the malaise engendered by bourgeois society; for apologists it is the defining imperative in all art of our time, and‘the modern genius is essentially avant-gardistic’.¹

Borrowed from military terminology by Bakunin, who titled the short-lived anarchist journal he published in Switzerland in 1878 L’Avant-Garde, the label was first applied to art by his followers. Their aim in revolutionizing aesthetics was to prefigure social revolution; and avant garde art is still characterized by a radical political posture. Envisioning a revolutionary future, it has been equally hostile to artistic tradition, sometimes including its immediate predecessors, as to contemporary civilization. Indeed, 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, and representing the amorphous complexity of post-industrial society in a multiplicity of dynamic but unstable movements focused on philosophic abstractions. Hence the use of‘-isms’ to describe them: symbolism, futurism, expressionism, formalism, surrealism.

However, beneath this diversity there is a clearly identifiable unity of purpose and interest (at least in the theatre) which has all the characteristics of a coherent trend, since its principles can be shown to be shared quite independent of direct influence. For example, there are striking similarities between the work of Antonin Artaud in the 1930s and of Jerzy Grotowski in the 1960s, even though Grotowski knew nothing of the‘theatre of cruelty’ when he developed his concept of‘poor theatre’. At the same time one can trace all the network of cross-fertilization that normally defines a single artistic movement, signalled equally by the continuing influence of a precursor (Alfred Jarry, August Strindberg) or shared vocabulary (for instance‘theatre laboratory’), as by cooperation and imitation.

Thus Artaud and Roger Vitrac named their theatre after Jarry, and Eugène Ionesco was a member of the Collège de Pataphysique, an antiestablishment group devoted to Jarry’s ideas. He included the figure of Jarry in one of his plays, while Jean-Louis Barrault based one of his last major productions on Jarry’s life. Jarry’s Ubu plays have been performed by Peter Brook, Joe Chaikin and the Becks’ Living Theatre, while a‘Savage God’ theatre company (named after W.B. Yeats’ disapproving response to the first performance of Ubu roi) was founded in Canada by John Juliani. Similarly the whole German expressionist movement derived from Strindberg, and one of Artaud’s earliest productions was Strindberg’s Dream Play, which also influenced Fernando Arrabal. Artaud worked both with Roger Blin, who directed all Genet’s major plays, and with Barrault, who was responsible for establishing Brook’s Centre for International The-atre Research in Paris, one of the many‘theatre laboratories’ thatfollowing Grotowski’s lead—were established in Belgium, Denmark and the United States in the 1960s. It was specifically Artaud’s influence that led Brook to branch out from the traditional theatre, and Artaud’s The Theatre and its Double had an almost immediate impact on the American counter-culture theatre groups when finally translated into English, Ariane Mnouchkine is consciously paralleling both Artaud and Brook. Eugenio Barba was trained by Grotowski, and Chaikin by the Becks, while Grotowski, Brook and Chaikin have co-operated on joint projects. Brook worked with Charles Marowitz, whose Open Space theatre produced Sam Shepard’s first major play; and Shepard later collaborated with Chaikin. Heiner Müller, whose early work has links with Artaud as well as the expressionists, joined forces with the neo-surrealist Robert Wilson in the 1980s. These interconnections chart the mainline avant garde movement, although there are many other names that could be mentioned.²

For contemporary observers in the 1920s, or even in the 1960s, what is central was often obscured by the rhetoric of manifestos claiming uniqueness for different aspects of the general movement. But from today’s perspective shared concerns stand out clearly because they recur. And this recurrence is even more significant since, although it is obviously a response to the ethics of the age, it by no means reflects popularly accepted ideas or the dominant ideological assumptions.

Perhaps paradoxically, what defines this avant garde movement is not overtly modern qualities, such as the 1920s romance of technology—Georges Antheil’s‘aeroplane sonata’, Corrado Govoni’s‘poésie elettriche’ or Enrico Prampolini’s‘theatre of mechanics’—but primitivism. This has two complementary facets: the exploration of dream states or the instinctive and subconscious levels of the psyche; and the quasi-religious focus on myth and magic, which in the theatre leads to experiments with ritual and the ritualistic patterning of performance. These are integrated not only by the Jungian concept that all figures of myth are contained in the unconscious as expressions of psychological archetypes, but also by the idea that symbolic or mythopoeic thinking precedes language and discursive reason, revealing fundamental aspects of reality that are unknowable by any other means.

³ Both are variations of the same aim: to return to man’s‘roots’, whether in the psyche or prehistory. In theatrical terms this is reflected by a reversion to‘original’ forms: the Dionysian rituals of ancient Greece, shamanistic performances, the Balinese dance-drama. Along with antimaterialism and revolutionary politics, the hallmark of avant garde drama is an aspiration to transcendence, to the spiritual in its widest sense. Antonin Artaud’s pretentious claim to a‘Holy Theatre’—picked up by various avant garde artists, most recently Murray Shafer—is revealing.

Even for anthropologists or ethnographers, the primitive is almost always seen through a western, contemporary prism; and creative artists freely reinterpret primitive models to serve aims that would be alien to the original culture. However, this is far more than a cult of the superficially exotic and barbaric. In avant garde drama, as the widespread use of a term like‘theatre laboratory’ in the 1960s and 1970s indicates, primitivism goes hand in hand with aesthetic experimentation designed to advance the technical progress of the art itself by exploring fundamental questions: The questions are: 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?’⁴ On this level, the scientific ethos of the modern age parallels the return to‘primal’ forms, equally signalling an attempt to replace the dominant modes of drama—and by extension the society of which these are the expression—by rebuilding from first principles.

The idealization of the primitive and elemental in theatre, together with the rediscovery and adapting of remote or archaic models, could be seen as an extension of the medievalism and orientalism of the nineteenth-century romantics. It parallels the borrowings from African sculpture or pre-Columbian Indian artifacts in the visual arts from Post-Impressionism on, and can be found in many other aspects of modern culture. It is echoed in Freud’s‘primal’ therapy and his‘attempt in Totem and Taboo to exploit the newly won analytic insights for an investigation of the origins of religion and morality’, or in the anthropological value placed on the primitive state by Lévi-Strauss.⁵ It is expressed in Conrad’s fascination with‘the heart of darkness’, or in D.H. Lawrence’s primitivism, as in the popular escapism of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan series that were as much in vogue during the 1960s and 1970s, as they had been when first published between 1912 and 1936. It also conditions critical theories such as Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideal of‘carnivalesque’ literature, which proposes artistic forms that embody the anarchic and grotesque, inherently revolutionary energies of the Roman Saturnalia and medieval popular carnivals as an alternative to the‘limited and reduced aesthetic stereotypes of modern times’.⁶

Indeed aspects of primitivism—ranging from ritualistic techniques, or borrowing from archaic and oriental traditions, to the presentation of dream states and surrealistic images, or an attempt to tap the spectators’ subconscious—have been so widespread in twentieth-century theatre that the boundaries of the avant garde are amorphous. In part the movement is hard to distinguish because its influence has been so pervasive. It can be traced in an official institution like Vilar’s Théâtre National Populaire, which also searched for‘ceremonial subjects’ to establish a communion between actors and spectators comparable with the mass enthusiasm evoked by medieval mysteries. It surfaces in the Nazi ‘Thingspiel’, and in rock festivals, where the rhythms and psychedelic lights urge a similar surrender to the instinctive id that in the right conditions resembles a Dionysiac revel.

Avant garde elements also appear in other types of experimental theatre. Some of W.B. Yeats’ comments seem to echo exactly the same concerns:‘I have always felt that my work is not drama but the ritual of a lost faith’ -’drama which would give direct expression to reverie, to the speech of the soul with itself’. And his borrowing from Japanese Nōh theatre, or his use of incantation and ritualized movement, is typical. Even his Rosicrucian mysticism has its counterparts. Yet his poetic aims are traditional, appealing‘to the eye of the mind’—the conscious imagination—and relying on‘the ancient sovereignty of words’, while the avant garde moved in exactly the opposite direction.⁷ Similarly, Samuel Beckett’s work is related in its use of symbolism and psychodrama, as in its stripping away of worn- out theatrical idioms to create minimalist images—but despite early interest in the surrealists, his existential vision is quite distinct from the avant garde stress on liberating the primitive side of the psyche.

The mainstream of the avant garde is not simply defined by shared stylistic qualities, although these may be what is most immediately obvious. Rather, the avant garde is essentially a philosophical grouping. Its members are linked by a specific attitude to western society, a particular aesthetic approach, and the aim of transforming the nature of theatrical performance: all of which add up to a distinctive ideology. Although there may be stylistic similarities in the work of a symbolist like Yeats, or an existentialist like Beckett—as in surrealists like Cocteau and Breton, an absurdist such as Adamov, or a religious dramatist like T.S. Eliot— the essential basis of their art is antithetical to the anarchic primitivism and radical politics of the avant garde.

2: THE POLITICS OF PRIMITIVISM

BAKUNIN—BAKHTIN

The identifying signature of avant garde art, all the way back to Bakunin and his anarchist journal L’Avant-Garde in 1878, has been an unremitting hostility to contemporary civilization. Its most obvious aspect has been negative: the rejection of social organization and artistic conventions, aesthetic values and materialistic ideals, syntactical structure and logic, as well as everything associated with the bourgeoisie. But this apparent nihilism always implied a utopian alternative to the status quo, which has three aspects. Broadly speaking these can be called the philosophical, the populist and the primitive—although such avant garde categories are often inseparable, equally political and tend to be expressed in psychological terms.

As a philosophy, the avant garde corresponds to anarchism, which also has its nihilistic side. Although its public image became misleadingly associated with bearded, bomb-throwing terrorists, the basic principle of the turn-of-the-century anarchist movement could be best described as extreme individualism. For Bakunin and his followers, personal rights totally superseded those of the state, which by definition were coercive; egalitarian communes would be the only valid form of social organization; and all set rules that prescribed behaviour (‘being’) had to be discarded for a fluid sense of individual fulfilment (‘becoming’). In general terms these remain the ideals of the avant garde, even if their source frequently went unrecognized, while translating them into theatrical practice tended to disguise the link with Bakunin’s ideas. Thus the anarchist battle against political hierarchies turned into an attack on the cultural hegemony of the establishment (which was sometimes little more than épater les bourgeois). Personal liberation came to be conceived psychologically or even spiritually, rather than as an external condition, although the route to its achievement was frequently physical—freeing the mind through assaulting the senses—and had strong political overtones. The commune was identified with the acting group: again, in a sense, an internalization of the anarchist aim. And an emphasis on artistic creation as‘process’, in place of presenting a theatrical‘product’, substituted for the notion of‘becoming’ versus‘being’.

Exactly the same anti-hierarchical ethos characterizes the populist aspect of anarchism, which is perhaps best defined in Mikhail Bakhtin’s work. Despite being isolated from avant garde developments in Stalinist Russia and restricted to literary theory, his path-breaking studies of Dostoevsky and particularly Rabelais are not only representative, but also offer a critical tool for analysing avant garde work. By contrast to classical and mimetic literature—seen as inherently authoritarian and logocentric in its‘monologism’ (his term for Aristotelian unity and the separation of genres, in which aesthetic harmony is achieved by a singleness of voice and perspective)—Bakhtin traces a counter-culture archetype to popular street carnivals. All of what has been defined as‘great literature’ since the Renaissance is considered an aberration in the context of this much longer‘folk tradition’, which incorporates contradictory elements, combining the comic and tragic with the grotesque, to create a multi-tonal or‘dialogic’ model that is intrinsically revolutionary.¹ Derived from the Russian Formalist school of linguistics, Bakhtin’s literary sociology parallels anarchism but gives it a Marxist gloss.

As exemplified in the Roman Saturnalia, the medieval‘Feast of Fools’, or the modern Mardi Gras, for Bakhtin the essence of carnival was that it both comprised‘the people as a whole’ and made them‘aware of their sensual, material bodily unity and community’, as well as being‘outside of and contrary to all existing forms of the coercive socioeconomic and political organization, which is suspended for the time of the festival’. An antidote to the‘official’ culture (whether ecclesiastic or feudal) that promotes an abstract spirituality at the expense of the physical, and is characterized by rigidity and intellectual seriousness, the carnival spirit asserts the biological basis of life, the oneness of human existence with the earth. It exalts all‘lower’ elements: those that are denigrated or denied by the official value system, whether‘vulgar’ bodily functions,‘crude’/‘impure’ aesthetic categories, or social inferiors. Breaking taboos to signal‘the defeat. of the earthly upper classes, of all that oppresses and restricts’, it dissolves the concept of an atomized bourgeois individuality by making each festive participant conscious of‘being a member of a continually growing and renewed people’.² This utopian ideal of community (and by extension Communism) is both generated and affirmed by laughter. It is also presented as nothing less than a‘cosmic principle’, one of Bakhtin’s recurring labels for the carnevalesque.

Translated into literary terms (with Rabelais as the archetypal exemplar, from whom Bakhtin derives a radical theory of humour), this carnival spirit is expressed in gargantuan themes of physical appetite and excremental or genital imagery, corrosive parody, and abusive language, together with violent shifts of tone or the juxtaposition of contradictory fragments, inversion and materialistic hyperbole. Its indispensable traits are the grotesque and ambivalence, which are seen as being integrally connected. On the thematic level a deliberate stressing of the ugly or monstrous, the half-formed or incomplete, and the unity of opposites (body and spirit, monkey and man, copulation and dismemberment) goes along with verbal puns, multiple viewpoints and switches in consciousness on a stylistic level. Artistic forms qualify as carnevalesque if they release imaginative and sexual energies by subverting social, moral and aesthetic categories, norms and prohibitions. Both the grotesque and ambivalence intrinsically display‘the potentiality of an entirely different world, of another order, another way of life’; and this is associated with irrationality or madness, which by definition offers an‘abnormal’ viewpoint that is free from conventional ideas and official‘truths’.³ It also relates to the kind of psychological universe created by Dostoevsky, where the disruption of cause-and-effect literary logic, together with temporal and spatial distortions, draw a reader inside the divided consciousness of an outcast whose pathological mentality casts doubt on standard concepts of reality.

Bakhtin himself pointed out the correspondence between the‘dialogizing’ of consciousness in Dostoevsky, and expressionist drama with its distorted perspectives and subjectivity. But the parallels between his ideas and avant garde theatre are far wider. Abusive parody, combined with the focus on physical ugliness and moral monstrosity are the hallmarks of Alfred Jarry’s fragmented plays. The positive function of madness, the inversion of moral categories and the grotesque in all its aspects are central to Antonin Artaud’s work. An ambivalent attack on the sacred, the breaking of taboos and the exaltation of the body characterize Jerzy Grotowski’s theatre, leading to a search for primal relationships between man and the natural world. Sexual liberation and social revolution formed the core of the Living Theatre, revolving around a universal ideal of community that was represented as a cosmic principle. Indeed, Jarry and Jean-Louis Barrault both created dramas based on Rabelais: one right at the start of the avant garde movement, the other as a direct response to the student revolution of 1968. In a sense, through Jarry, the roots of avant garde theatre lie in the type of radical laughter that Bakhtin saw as fundamental to the carnival spirit, which is also evident in the dark expressionist depictions of urban existence and the surrealist portrayals of the bourgeoisie, although comedy is signally absent from Artaud and most later manifestations of the avant garde.

This tendency to quasi-religious seriousness, which all too often led to inflated self-pretension, is the antithesis of Bakhtin’s carnival spirit. But carnevalesque qualities are the defining marks of avant garde drama: in particular the emphasis on stage production as process in opposition to the fixed art-product of classical aesthetics; and the fusion of actors and audience, breaking down the barriers between performance and reality to create a comm-union of (in theory at least) equal participants. As Bakhtin puts it,‘Carnival was…the feast of becoming, change and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and completed’—both in...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• AVANT GARDE THEATRE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• 1: INTRODUCTION
• 2: THE POLITICS OF PRIMITIVISM
• 3: DREAMS, ARCHETYPES AND THE IRRATIONAL
• 4: THERAPY AND SUBLIMINAL THEATRE
• 5: ANTONIN ARTAUD AND THE THEATRE OF CRUELTY
• 6: RITUAL AND ACTS OF COMMUNION
• 7: BLACK MASSES AND CEREMONIES OF NEGATION
• 8: MYTH AND THEATRE LABORATORIES
• 9: SECULAR RELIGIONS AND PHYSICAL SPIRITUALITY
• 10: ANTHROPOLOGY, ENVIRONMENTAL THEATRE AND SEXUAL REVOLUTION
• 11: INTERCULTURALISM AND EXPROPRIATING THE CLASSICS
• 12: FROM THE MARGINS TO MAINSTREAM
• NOTES
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY