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The Politics, Packaging, and Potential of Performance Art

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

R. G. Davis
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Abstract

Is the ‘Performance art’ whose influence is pervasive in today's American theatre truly in the ‘tradition’ of the avant-garde – or merely modish? In an age where fashions, whether in theatre, clothing. or motor cars. are manufactured to facilitate the turnover necessary for mass-produced obsolescence, does ‘imagist’ theatre serve as a force for social change – or merely titillate palates as jaded by yesterday's art as by yesterday's styles? R. G. Davis looks at the ways in which visually- oriented forms of theatre have been constructed and received in America since the ‘happenings’ of the early ‘sixties – and at the changing political climate since that time, which has itself modified the impact of any artistic statement. He asks whether the progressive theatre worker should in today's reactionary climate regard such forms as suspect, or look for ways of harnessing them to the creation of a ‘dialectical view of pleasure’ through the multi-faceted potential of epic theatre. R. G. Davis, who was founding director of the San Francisco Mime Troupe in the 'sixties, is a leading director of Brecht and, more recently, of Dario Fo in the United States, and is currently directing his adaptation of llya Ehrenburg'sLife of the Automobile as an imagistc theatre piece. He has been a regular contributor to TQ and NTQ.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 4 , Issue 13 , February 1988 , pp. 17 - 31
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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References

Notes and References

1. Williams, Raymond, Problems in Materialism and Culture (Verso, 1980), p. 31–49Google Scholar.

2. Debord, Guy, Society of the of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983), p. 35–6.Google Scholar This situationist manifesto in 221 image cuts/paragraphs is provocative on Paris in 1965–68, and useful for illuminating elements of the consciousness-making industry passed by sociologists who would live with ‘exposing the media’ as being run by dullards or business people.

3. Poggioli, Renato, The Theory of the Avant-Carde (Cam-bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968)Google Scholar.

4. In the US only the stand-up comics with a low or popular perspective take risks. Moms Mably exposed niggers in the black community, and early Borscht Belt comics exposed the yids in their audiences.

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7. Mounted respectively by George Coats Theatre Works, Chris Hardman's Antenna Theatre, Laura Farabough Nightfire Theatre, Night Letter Theatre, Farrelon Island Group, Bill Irwin, and Michael Peppe.

8. Barthes, Roland, Critical Essays (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), p. 277Google Scholar.

9. Barthes, op. cit.

10. Burger, Peter, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Shaw, M. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984)Google Scholar. This covers consumerism in various sections of a long essay on the institutionalization of art.

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13. Kirby, Michael, Happenings: an Illustrated Anthology (New York: Dutton, 1965)Google Scholar. Henri, Adrien, Total Art (New York: Praeger, 1974)Google Scholar. The volume lists these Happenings practitioners: Oldenburg, Kaprow, Cage, Red Grooms, Jim Dine, Whitman, Meredith Monk, and Carolee Schneeman.

14. Hansen, Al, A Primer of Happenings and Time/Space Art (New York: Something Else Press, 1965)Google Scholar. Hansen lists Hansen, Oldenburg, Kaprow, Cag's class, Meredith Monk, Ken Dewey, Lamont Young, Nam June Paik, Scheeman, Rainer, and anyone else who showed up at the Cafà Go Go in New York City.

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25. Ibid., p. 52.

26. Loeffler and Tong, p. 227.

27. Ibid., p. 336.

28. Ibid., p. 336.

29. Bron and Gale, p. 9.

30. Brecht on Theatre, p. 42.

31. Roland Barthes, Critical Essays, p. 261–3.

32. Theory of the Avant-Garde, p. 91.