Innes - Avant garde theatre, 1892-1992

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taken to describe what is new at any given time: the leading edge of artistic experiment, which is continually outdated by the next step forward. Butavant garde is by no means value-neutral, as such usage implies. For Marxist critics like George Lukcs 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, andthe modern genius is essentially avant-gardistic.

Borrowed from military terminology by Bakunin, who titled the short-lived anarchist journal he published in Switzerland in 1878 LAvant-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 thetheatre of cruelty when he developed his concept ofpoor 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 instancetheatre laboratory), as by cooperation and imitation.

Thus Artaud and Roger Vitrac named their theatre after Jarry, and Eugne Ionesco was a member of the Collge de Pataphysique, an antiestablishment group devoted to Jarrys ideas. He included the figure of Jarry in one of his plays, while Jean-Louis Barrault based one of his last major productions on Jarrys life. Jarrys