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Reviewed by:
  • Avant-Garde Performance: Live Events and Electronic Technologies
  • Scott W. Cole
Avant-Garde Performance: Live Events and Electronic Technologies. By Günter Berghaus . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005; pp. xxvi + 374. $33.95 paper.

A new book by Günter Berghaus is an exciting addition to theatre history, and this book is certainly a joy. The wonderful and very valuable bibliography (which I will say more about at the end of this review) notwithstanding, Berghaus has provided a simple, clear, and concise treatment of some of the most challenging "new paradigms" of avant-garde performance of the past century: from Jarry's 1896 production of Ubu Roi, which acted like "dynamite thrown at an audience" (25), to Stelarc's cybernetic explorations of the late 1990s.

Berghaus begins his volume with two frank and refreshing caveats. First, he openly notes that "faced with the choice of writing an encyclopedic 'who's who in avant-garde performance' or focusing on some two dozen key figures placed in a historical, social and aesthetic context, I opted for the latter" (xvii). What follows is a text that does not exhaustively excavate all avant-garde performances of the twentieth century, but rather presents a tightly woven narrative of selected highlights of some of the most powerful, articulate, and viscerally stimulating performances that radically altered the theatrical landscape. And second, and quite refreshingly for this reviewer, Berghaus admits that he "disagrees with many critics who maintain that access to avant-garde performance is impossible without being intimately familiar with the theory behind them" (xix). Instead, he maintains that just as his early contacts with the avant-garde were "visceral rather than intellectual" (xix), so too can an understanding of some of the seemingly baffling performances be understood through rich and evocative description [End Page 693] and not through heavy-handed theoretical jargon. As Berghaus states: "It has never been my intention to offer with this study an original contribution to a theory of the avant-garde in performance; in fact, if anything it sidelines theory and gives much wider representation to artistic praxis in the performance medium" (xxi).

The beginning of Berghaus's volume is situated, quite smartly, at the turn of the century and provides a tight and reasoned argument of the transition from modernity to the avant-garde. In the first chapter, he focuses on the rise of modernity and the subsequent advent of modernism (in art, theatre, music) and the avant-garde, and uses this opening chapter to explore the differences between them. Textboxes and historical timelines within the chapter (a strategy that Berghaus successfully implements throughout) highlight and assist the reader in understanding key concepts and moments. In the next chapter, Berghaus turns his study toward a concise statement of the roles of Jarry's Ubu Roi, Oskar Kokoschka's Murderer Hope of Woman, the Futurist serate, and the Dada soirées of the early twentieth century and how they acted as historical influences on the later avant-garde performances that the volume explores in the following chapters.

Chapter 3 turns the study briefly towards an analysis of the transition from late modernism to postmodernism, and Berghaus examines the rise of the twentieth-century technological inventions of computers and television. This chapter is a wonderful addition to the history of avant-garde performance because it concretely places the historical innovations of technology—and the transition from mechanical to electronic culture—squarely within the concurrent rise and virtual explosion of postmodern avant-garde performance. He highlights the notion that "avant-garde performance was a temporary site of exchange between artists and audience and, as such, [was] markedly different from mainstream theatre geared towards commodities that could be repeated night after night ad infinitum" (77).

From here, Berghaus's volume takes off as the following chapters focus on the various incantations of avant-garde performance that reverberated throughout the twentieth century. Chapter 4 investigates Happenings and touches upon the work of Allan Kaprow, Robert Rauschenberg, Wolf Vostell, Jean-Jacques Lebel, and others, then moves into the work of George Maciunas and the birth of Fluxus. With a focus on the nonrepeatability of these performances and their aspect of process over product, Berghaus...

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