Contours of the Theatrical Avant-Garde: Performance and Textuality ed. by James M. Harding (review)

REVIEWS and literary scholar Bennett Simon's 1986 Hebrew University Studies in Literature and the Arts article "Poetry, Tragic Dialogue, and the Killing of Children in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night." Perhaps O'Neill's two sons were genetically destined to be self-destructive, but O'Neill was no stable, steady father to them, early or late. It may be that "writing plays allowed O'Neill to find in his life an aesthetic coherence resembling that which he gave the materials of his plays" (xviii). Such a claim longs to be seen as a variation on modernism's expectations of art, but on the cultural formation of modernism, Black's project can offer us no perspective. His considerable achievement is to have given us a more psychologically coherent view of the writer and his plays than we have had. JAMES M. HARDING, ed. Contours ofthe Theatrical Avant-Garde: Pelformance and Textuality. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Pp. 3D!. $54.50 (Hb); $22.95 (Pb). Reviewed by Stephen J. Bottoms, University oJG/asgow James Harding's admirable collection of essays on the twentieth-century theatrical avant-garde. both in Europe and in America, is a valuable and engaging contribution to scholarship in this area. Assembling contributions from a formidable selection of leading international scholars in theatre and performance - Philip Auslander, Sally Banes, Erika Fischer-Lichte, David Graver, Christopher Innes, Patrice Pavis, Richard Schechner, Mike Sell, Lawrence Senelick, Kristine Stiles, and Michael Vanden Heuvel- Harding has targeted the thorny subject of the avant-garde's relation to textuality. While much commentary on the subject tends to characterize avant-garde theatre as having been traditionally resistant to textuality, and particularly to the "authoritarian" control of the playwright's script, Harding has sought to assemble a subtler range of analyses that explore the avant-garde's multifaceted dependence on and relation to textuality. These essays examine everything from the use of written "scores" or scripts as the pre-texts for even the most contingent of performance events through to the way in which the avant-garde itself has been defined and, to some extent, contained by the textual-theoretical constructs of artists' manifestos and the academy itself. The essays approach the central topic of the book from a variety of different angles - historical, theoretical, political, institutional. Harding has divided the book into four parts, which, broadly speaking, reflect those four different areas of concern, although the pigeonholing is not always comfortable, since the essays leak freely across these borders, constantly suggesting a kind of spiderweb of tangential connections to each other. Indeed, what is most exciting about these essays is that so many of them resist simple categorization by Reviews 497 taking unorthodox approaches to their subject matter. Mike Sells. for example. considers the New York happenings of the 1960s - normally treated from an entirely aesthetic or philosophical perspective - in terms of their underlying political resonance. In a complementary essay. Philip Auslander argues persuasively for the Fluxus movement of the same period to be considered in terms of the paradigms of musical performance. even when the event appears purely visual. Harding himself. homing in on one particularly revealing incident in contemporary theatre history, offers an incisive examination of the competing political perspectives surrounding the Living Theatre-led occupation of the Odeon in Paris during the uprising of May t968. He explores the differences between Julian Beck and Judith Malina (self-proclaimed disciples of Artaud) and Jean-Louis Barrault (former friend of Artaud and resident director at the Odeon) as a kind of paradigmatic working out of conflicting positions on politics and aesthetics that have always existed within avant-garde praxis. The single most provocative contribution to the collection, however, is unquestionably Kristine Stiles's lengthy closing essay. which retroactively asks all sorts of awkward questions of everything that has gone before. In directly addressing the question of feminist performance art. Stiles highlights the almost total absence of attention to gender questions - or, indeed, to women artists - in the collection's other essays. This is also the only essay that deals in any detail with work produced in the decades since the t960s - a fact that makes all...