On the Emergence of European Avant-Garde Theatre

{ 131 } \ On the Emergence of European Avant-Garde Theatre —ANTONIS GLYTZOURIS Introduction: A Problem of Theatre Historiography When historians of theatre examine bibliographical sources concerning the genesis of European avant-garde theatre, they usually find exceptional works on the major artistic movements, including monographs on artists as well as anthologies of theoretical texts and manifestos, but they are unable to accomplish the goal of tracking down a comprehensive historical study dealing with the phenomenon of the emergence of the theatrical avant-garde.1 This short essay does not set out to accomplish this immense goal; rather, it seeks to put in order the pieces of a puzzle in order to provide an overview, to map an existing situation, and to put forward a working hypothesis on the rise of theatrical avant-garde. Even the preliminary problems historians have to confront are complex and thorny. In the final analysis, the most serious of these problems has to do with the way historians of the theatre must connect the art of the theatre with avant-garde art so that they neither disassociate the art from the general discourse on the history and theory of the avant-garde nor apply to the field of theatre history general theoretical constructions, which are derived from aesthetics , literature, or the fine arts.2 Additionally, one must bear in mind the contemporary dispute between theatre studies and performance studies.3 Problems of this kind usually appear when researchers do not make an effort to avoid projecting current ideological quarrels into the past. As a consequence, they put forward extremely restrictive theoretical schemata that may be convenient and fascinating but which, historically speaking, remains arbitrary and distortive. { 132 } ANTONIS GLYTZOURIS As historians do not begin their research based only on theoretical tools but, primarily, based on evidence, they cannot ignore the fact that the terms related to avant-garde theatre appeared not with futurism or constructivism but much earlier: in the context of the first independent theatres, naturalism, and symbolism .4 Theatre historians do not start their job with present theories of avantgarde performance, with a theoretical definition of what avant-garde theatre is. For their purposes, avant-garde theatre is simply what a given society at a given time regards as such. This happened for the first time in the history of European theatre in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. If one adopts the perspective of post–World War I avant-garde aesthetics, one will characterize the pioneers of the first modernist wave as mere reformers or innovators and not as eclectic avant-garde artists. In its effort to define the concept of avant-garde and in order to come close to current beliefs, much theatre historiography does not listen to anything from the past but instead the echo of its own voice. The far-reaching consequences of this approach are that it reproduces another prejudice: in order to read the past, it adopts (and is confined within) the perspective of the neo-Darwinist ideals of avant-gardism.5 In this way, it continues to think a priori of avant-garde not as a historical form but in terms of its own self-definition, that is, within and yet outside bourgeois society: living behind a shield that protects it from the abuses of modernity and mass pop culture of the twentieth century. Pop culture is usually denounced and rejected as the revolting producer of a“cheap”form of industrialized entertainment created for a mass market. This approach seems to ignore that commercialization of the avant-garde movements had already begun in the years of its emergence, just because it was the lawful (albeit somewhat irregular) child of a modern society. It carried in its chromosomes some of the paramount values of modernity: radicalization, experimentation, and innovation, even if the latter sometimes meant destruction. As Adorno put it,“the new in art is the aesthetic counterpart to the expanding reproduction of capital in society. Both hold out the promise of undiminished plenitude.”6 From the above sample of problems it becomes clear that the complex phenomenon of avant-garde theatre is a matter of degree, associated always with a specific set of historical circumstances. It would...