Vanguard Performance Beyond Left and Right ed. by Kimberly Jannarone (review)

Vanguard Performance Beyond Left and Right seeks to "correct" the temptation of performance scholars to equate formal experimentation and institutional opposition with leftist politics (7). Across fourteen essays edited and introduced by Kimberly Jannarone, the volume focuses on vanguard performance, a category as tempted as any by this "political fallacy" (2). At a historical moment when what counts as Left and Right seems increasingly up for debate, the collection makes a timely intervention into the criteria that scholars use to judge the politics of radical performances practices.

The preference for vanguard signaled in the book's title is meant to both sidestep and foreground the "historical and political critical baggage" carried by the more familiar term avant-garde (6). This includes the avant-garde's association with an array of European and North American art movements from the first half of the twentieth century, as well as its alignment with loosely progressive political projects. Understood in this light, vanguard performance becomes a capacious category that refuses the sort of geographic, periodizing, and political assumptions that over-determine the meaning of the avant-garde. But without such defining qualities, what does vanguard performance actually describe?

As presented here, vanguardism at its root designates a radicalness that has less to do with particular ideologically inflected intentions than with principled stances against a shifting status quo. The essays collected in Vanguard Performance Beyond Left and Right—several of which have previously appeared elsewhere—rightly contend that the political Left has no monopoly on antagonism or innovation. As a category, vanguard performance both encompasses and calls attention to myriad instances of artistic invention and political subversion that emanate from the ostensible Right.

Even as Jannarone insists that the category of vanguard performance has wide geographic and historical scope, much of the collection remains focused on the well-worn terrain of war-torn Western Europe before 1945. Several of the chapters offer what amounts to a travelogue of European fascist aesthetics: Patricia Gaborik takes us to Italy, where Luigi Pirandello worked comfortably within a Mussolinibacked arts milieu; Monica Achen surveys pre-Nazi expressionist playwriting in Germany; and Graham White turns to the failed aspirations that British novelist Henry Williamson held for England's fascists. Unsurprisingly, the exemplar for vanguard performance in this book is the Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, whose work figures prominently in a handful of the essays. Only two contributions look beyond Europe or North America: Kara Reilly's careful look at the ritual suicide of Yukio Mishima in 1970s Japan; and Katherine Profeta's sweeping discussion of the pivot that Zhang Yimou made from subversive filmmaker to architect of the 2008 Beijing Olympic opening ceremonies. The republication of Richard Schechner's meditation on the 9/11 attacks could be considered as another exception, although he situates the events within a familiar genealogy of avant-garde performance.

As a result, the collection's major contribution to defining vanguard performance comes through its focus on the political ambivalence of radical practices. Vanguard performance is not just a category that covers diverse political intents, but is also a critical concept that acknowledges the ease with which a radical practice can itself slip into the status quo. Jannarone's pithy introduction sets out as the volume's "central paradox" this claim that "innovative performance designed to challenge established power structures can be deployed in deliberate, passionate support of established and even oppressive power structures" (1). Of course, this is less a paradox than the very historical soil from which most cultural production grows—an ambivalence that James Harding describes in his chapter as the vanguard's "cutting edge" (241). Odai Johnson presents a case example of vanguardist ambivalence by tracking how state-sponsored fascist cultural movements in Germany and Italy actively retooled the modernist aesthetics of major figures in interwar dance, such as Mary Wigman and Rudolf Laban. Ambivalence can operate in other ways as well. Ann Pellegrini's contribution, for instance, tracks how the transformative aesthetics of homophobic...