Alive Wire or Vital Signs

Alive Wire or Vital Signs Matthew Maguire There is something out there so coiled, so electric, so hot, I can smell the air burning. It is a presence. But not for Richard Schechner. A magazine, DATA, arrived from Antwerp last week, devoted to the avant garde in NYC including Schechner's, "The Decline and Fall of the (American) Avant Garde." I was angry when I read his article in PAJ but it was not until I saw it in Dutch that I realized he is trying to spread his idea as far as he can and that he must be refuted. I am one of those people that Schechner is not aware of, part of a generation he believes is missing. Still in my twenties, I am, along with Susan Mosakowski, one of the directors of Creation, an experimental theatre company in NYC. I believe that S's statement is harmful because it creates a negative atmosphere for the artists, regardless of their generation , who are continuing to experiment. Its inaccuracies provide further justification for society to ignore experiment since the avant-garde, according to one of its most visible, articulate proponents has, for all practical purposes, died. His opinion could damage our survival abilities by discouraging the European touring circuit. Touring conditions have suffered enough from the economic and nuclear deployments of Reagan without S telling them we don't exist. The difficulties of fundraising in the U.S. will become even more exaggerated if his "polemic" is accepted. So, for survival's sake, there is a need for an accurate history. S falls guilty of his own complaint of "stupid journalism" by his lack of exhaustive documentation and by his regressive failure of leadership. What he passes off (too late!) as suggestions to 39 ressurect his "fall" are really the protective movements of an armadillo structure rolling itself up to escape attack after slinging the mud: "interculturalism ,".".. . find a few like-minded people and form a group, a cell, a club." He does not talk positively about how he will form a group in the 80's. He does not reveal his own plan of action. Why did he write it? Is it because in the last several years he has had a parting with his group, and his marriage, and of his last three productions two got bad press and the third failed to open? The "edge" is an idea which continually destroys and renews itself, and to give S the benefit of the doubt, maybe he is just performing The Great Destroyer, a benign act like surgery. Why must he forde the issue of a generation gap? To think the worst, he may be deliberately trying to rush the new generation, a pre-emptive strike in an effort to stunt it. A counter revolutionary? Schechner's stance is one of exclusion-we had the secret and it died with us, mea culpa, mea culpa, but the lineage broke and ours was the last generation-like a Cronus he is even willing to accept the burden of sterility as long as he can keep the secret. There need not be a generation gap, it is a flux, an exchange of tensions . Therein may lie the key. A possible explanation for his attack is that (having an aesthetic stance of sleeper, of heckler) he was playing the provocateur and his argument overwhelmed him. The heckler: stemming (theoretically)from his belief that unless a performer is so rooted in his performance , like a dervish, that nothing can shake him, the performance is paled. At a performance of Foreman's Penguin Touquet he sat behind me. As the penguins entered he shouted out, "More, more, only two?" Anecdotes of S as a heckler are so abundant that I only add one more to show that his present argument is consistent with a pattern of conflict he has flaunted in the past. Perhaps S is only feistily trying to provoke the avantgarde for its own good with phrases like "dismal swamp" and "bad smell." If his despair is genuine then he deserves to be enlightened. Most of his peers are hitting their stride. Why, when they have finally achieved some recognition...