Avant Garde Theatre Essay

Theatre as we know it now was born more than two thousand years ago and has gone through many streams until it reached the current modernity. Among these streams is the avant-garde theatre. This theatre achieved a break in the traditional theatre and became the forefront of a new experimental theatre. Therefore it is necessary to ask how this theatre started, what impact it had on society and if this type of theatre is still common in our modern era.
Avant-garde mainly refers to a movement of artists and thinkers that oppose mainstream cultural values. This usually leads to an instantaneous rejection by the majority of society and a possible late recognition. It brings new ideas that society find hard to absorb. As described in his article “the Avant-garde, rarely love at first sight,” New York Times reporter, Margo Jefferson, new taste is rejected at first: “It may be that the viewer is a philistine or the critic a fraud. But it also may be that the brush with an unfamiliar theatrical form was too brief and too unexpected. Experimental theater, after all, is an acquired taste - like aged cheese or raw fish. It is an experience that needs some effort, some study and some time.” (Jefferson)
In her intriguing article “Avant-garde theatre: has Britain lost its mind?” arts and media correspondent on the Observer, Vanessa Thorpe, describes avant-garde as follows:
In popular entertainment, if not in literature, yesterday's avant garde is often tomorrow's mainstream, so the term can function as a label simply identifying the next trend. As the American poet John Ashbery pointed out in an influential 1968 essay on the nature of the avant garde, where once an innovative artist had to wait a whole career to see their work absorbed into m...

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...er new wave in the 1880’s, it didn’t reach the United States until the 40’s. The first American avant-garde performance was in 1948 at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. According to writer and art historian and professor, Arnold Aronson: “In the roughly thirty-year period from the mid-1950’s to the mid 1980’s there was an eruption of theatrical activity in the United States that would ultimately reshape every aspect of performance and have significant influences both at home and abroad” (Qtd in DiLorenzo). The modern avant-garde theatre performance emerged when theatre decided to liberate itself from drama. This began with the new dynamic concept of the naturalistic "milieu" and its consequences in the art of stage direction. It matured with the poetic theatre of symbolist suggestiveness and imagination and the work of such visionaries as Appia (Glytzouris).