Experimental or avant-garde theatre

[Martinus]

I like it as long as it is good. The problem with modern theatre is the same with any modern art - it's not that artists these days are crappier than in the days of old, but we don't have decades separating us from the bad stuff that got forgotten, so only good stuff survived to our times.

[Caliga]

Good point, and actually this production is part of the Humana Festival of New American Plays, the point of which is to debut new plays and see if they're good enough to "make it" on a wide scale.

[FunkMonk]

Anyway, so that scene ended abruptly and then the next scene consisted of an actress reading index cards with a random mix of catch phrases on them, pitching each one to the floor.  Behind her, there was a woman repeatedly vomiting into a bucket, a naked guy wrapped in clear plastic screaming and chewing on the front of the plastic thing like he was trying to burst out of a chrysalis (very Silent-Hillish), a guy in his underwear being duct-taped to a flagpole by two other men, another guy hitting the stage wall repeatedly with a baseball bat, and another guy wearing a grotesque clown mask (looked like a Killer Klowns prop) parading around in random circles.  It got increasingly hard to hear the card reader over the cacophony going on behind her.

Oh, so it's a comedy.

It's AVANT-GARDE comedy! 

[Sheilbh]

I like good theatre.  You know I don't think anything I've seen that's avant-gartde (however good) is as avant-garde as almost any Samuel Beckett play.

I've seen some shit theatre - or I've seen enough to know that it's time to leave - and I've seen some incredible stuff.  Avant-gardeyness doesn't matter in that sense.  I've got as much out of a tiny, ensemble, all-male, circus-based production of A Midsummer Night's Dream as I have from Peter Brook's relatively conventional Hamlet.  What matters is quality of acting, ideas, execution (lighting, stage design, etc.), direction and to a lesser extent writing.

So I can't say whether I like avant-garde theatre or not.  I like good theatre and I like good writing.  Whether it's Mark Ravenhill or Ben Jonson I'm watching if there's skill and precision in it it's worth it whether they do it in period costume with a fourth wall removed or whether they do it naked in a paddling pool full of mud.


Incidentally my favourite pseudo-avant-gardeyness was an Italian version of A Midsummer Night's Dream I once saw.  Half-way through, for no apparent reason, all the women took their tops off and started playing catch with a big beach ball all over the stage.  According to the Director's notes it was to suggest the 'dream-like' quality of the play

[Sheilbh]

I like it as long as it is good. The problem with modern theatre is the same with any modern art - it's not that artists these days are crappier than in the days of old, but we don't have decades separating us from the bad stuff that got forgotten, so only good stuff survived to our times.

Yeah I love the Royal Court and going to see new theatre.  But it can be quite hit-and-miss.  There's only so many times you can watch someone desperately try and aim for some epater les bourgeois style thing when they're the only people watching.

In Bristol though I go to lots at a festival of physical theatre run by the Bristol Old Vic called Mayfest, which is normally excellent.  Basically it's because they tend to be physical pieces that have succeeded elsewhere before they get to play here.

[PDH]

I thought avant-garde was what you yelled before a sword fight.

[Martinus]

Incidentally my favourite pseudo-avant-gardeyness was an Italian version of A Midsummer Night's Dream I once saw.  Half-way through, for no apparent reason, all the women took their tops off and started playing catch with a big beach ball all over the stage.  According to the Director's notes it was to suggest the 'dream-like' quality of the play

I guess that's what the Director's dream would look like.

[Oexmelin]

I love it - but you have to screen for quality first. Fortunately, I find we have a lot of good ones here - the era where shock-value theatre was the end all be all is thankfully over. The last season of the Nouveau Théâtre Expérimental was amazing: a play on Lortie,  based on the true story of a half-crazed military guy who broke into the National Assembly and killed 3 people ; another play was about finding inspiration for a Bollywood movie in Quebec, questionning the idea of identity. I have yet to see the next one.

[Martinus]

Btw, how do you guys define avant-garde theatre? Does it have to break the narrative and/or the scene/audience boundary to be considered avant-garde or is it sufficient to be modern and figurative, but still maintain a relatively traditional narrative line (in terms of the form, not content).

[Sheilbh]

Btw, how do you guys define avant-garde theatre? Does it have to break the narrative and/or the scene/audience boundary to be considered avant-garde or is it sufficient to be modern and figurative, but still maintain a relatively traditional narrative line (in terms of the form, not content).

Well I don't know.  As I say I can't think of anyone more avant-garde than Beckett.  Famously in Waiting for Godot, nothing happens, twice.  One of his plays features three un-named characters (man, woman1, woman2) encased in funeral urns so they can't move.  Happy Days which is currently playing, starring Fiona Shaw, to rave reviews is difficult to describe but again the main character can't move.  She's encased in earth up to her waist at least (wiki's synopsis is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Days_(play) ).

I don't think you get any more destructive of narrative than a playwright who realised that drama's not about narrative at all, or anyone so brutal to form as a man who wrote a play of about 30 seconds length that's just breathing and screaming.

I think to an extent, if we take a minimalist definition of the avant-garde, all theatre has to be avant-garde - unless it's a bloated musical.  Because film does realism and the fourth wall stuff so much better and on such a smaller scale theatre has to, in my opinion, get rid of the audience/stage boundary.  This is often done, in traditional plays, by making the audience participate in some sense.  For example while the Victorians would have lots of extras clambering on stage to hear Mark Anthony, the standard modern performance would have him address the audience directly; they are the crowd outside the Senate listening to the funeral oration.  From what we know of Elizabethan staging, however, this isn't anything new.

I think playing around with form is more avant-garde, but even there it's now standard.    Mark Ravenhill's work mess around with form and narrative and come at things from a Marxist position which is all a bit cliche and 1960s.  On the upside his use of language is incredible and his plays are enjoyable.  But at the core of it all I think there's quite a puritan morality going on.  So I don't know how avant-garde even something like 'Shopping and Fucking' is.

I think the best I could do to describe the current avant-garde would be to emphasise its physicality and its attempt to be visceral.  It's influenced by Grotowski's 'poor theatre' and Artaud's 'theatre of cruelty'.  But even that's been done for years, at least since Steven Berkoff and 'Metamorphosis'.  But that's not enough.  So I can't define it.

[jimmy olsen]

When I see five weirdos dressed in togas stabbing a guy in the middle of a park in full view of a hundred people, I shoot the bastards, that's my policy.

[Caliga]

 

[Ed Anger]

When I see five weirdos dressed in togas stabbing a guy in the middle of a park in full view of a hundred people, I shoot the bastards, that's my policy.

You finally came up with a good one.

FINALLY.

[Oexmelin]

That's the Naked Gun.

[Ed Anger]

That's the Naked Gun.

No crap. 

Normally he posts a picture of something totally retarded. With my fairness policy(tm), I reward proper quotes for movies.