INTRODUCTION
1. Mel Gordon, Dada Performance (New York: PAJ Publications, 1987), 15.
2. Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary, trans. Ann Raimes, ed. John Elderfield (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 70.
3. Ball, Flight Out of Time, 70.
4. Mike Sell, Avant-Garde Performance and Material Exchange (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), 9.
5. Ronald Murphy, Theorizing the Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 35.
6. Sell, Avant-Garde Performance and Material Exchange, 10.
7. Sell, Avant-Garde Performance and Material Exchange, 10.
8. T. J. Demos, “Zurich Dada: The Aesthetics of Exile,” in The Dada Seminars, ed. Leah Dickerman (Washington DC: Distributed Art Publishers, 2005), 7–8.
9. Ball, Flight out of Time, 70.
10. Ball, Flight Out of Time, 71.
11. Hugo Ball, “Gadji Beri Bimba,” in Dada Performance, ed. Mel Gordon (New York: PAJ Publications, 1987), 41.
12. Ball, Flight Out of Time, 67.
13. John Elderfield, introduction to Flight out of Time (Berkeley: U of California Press, 1996), xxvii.
14. Ball, Flight Out of Time, 67.
15. Ball, Flight Out of Time, 25.
16. Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989), 215.
17. Theodor Adorno, “Reconciliation Under Duress,” Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 2007), 176.
18. Jonathan P. Eburne and Rita Felski, “Introduction,” New Literary History 41 (2010): vi.
19. Eburne and Felski, “Introduction,” vi.
20. Eburne and Felski, “Introduction,” ix.
21. Eburne and Felski, “Introduction,” vii.
22. Mike Sell, “Resisting the Question, ‘What is an Avant-Garde?’,” New Literary Critique 41 (2010): 754.
23. Peter Bürger, “Avant-Garde and Neo-Avant-Garde: An Attempt to Answer Certain Critics of Theory of the Avant-Garde,” New Literary History 41 (2010): 703.
24. For a thorough discussion of Bürger’s anti-theatrical bias, see James Harding and John Rouse’s introduction to Not the Other Avant-Garde (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 1–6.
25. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre [1999] (London: Routledge, 2006), 48.
26. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 57.
27. In Germany, for example, reaction was so strong that an entire volume of criticism was published shortly afterwards by Martin Lüdke under the title Theorie der Avantgarde: Antworten auf Peter Bürgers Bestimmung von Kunst und bürgerlicher Gesellschaft (Surkamp, 1976). As is often the case, controversy did more to institutionalize the status of Bürger’s arguments than it did to lay them to rest.
28. Richard Schechner, “The Conservative Avant-Garde,” New Literary History 41 (2010): 896.
29. Eburne and Felski, “Introduction,” ix.
30. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 90.
31. Paul Mann, Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 3.
32. Robert Radin, “The Recuperation of ‘The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde’,” Diacritics 28, no. 2 (1998): 43.
33. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Noonday Press, 1975), 54–55.
34. Radin, “The Recuperation,” 42.
35. Benjamin Buchloh, “The Primary Colors for the Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of the Neo-Avant-Garde,” October 37 (1986): 42.
36. Renato Poggioli, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 52.
37. See Mike Sell, “Al Qaeda and the Avant-Garde: Towards a Genealogy of the Taliah,” Modernism / Modernity 18, no. 2 (2011): 395–404.
38. Poggioli, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 50.
39. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image / Music / Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 147.
CHAPTER 1
1. Christopher Innes, “Modernism in Drama,” in Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. Michael Levenson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 131.
2. All subsequent references will be to The Trial.
3. Matthew S. Witkovsky, “Dada Breton,” October 105 (2003): no. 136.
4. Frederick Busi, “Dada and the ‘Trial” of Maurice Barrès,” Boston University Journal 23, no. 2 (1975): 67.
5. Busi, “Dada and the ‘Trial’ of Maurice Barrès.”
6. George Hugnet, “Dada in Paris,” in The Dada Painters and Poets, ed. Robert Motherwell (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 184.
7. Gunter Berghaus, Theatre, Performance and the Historical Avant-Garde (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 164.
8. Hugnet, “Dada in Paris,” 185.
9. Tristan Tzara, L’Affaire Barrès, ed. Marguerite Bonnet (Paris: José Corti, 1987), 38.
10. Tzara, L’Affaire Barrès, 39.
11. Annabelle Melzer, Dada and Surrealist Performance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 154.
12. Tzara, L’Affaire Barrès, 38.
13. Gérard Durozoi, History of the Surrealist Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 24.
14. Durozoi, History of the Surrealist Movement.
15. Cited in Mark Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 157.
16. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 476.
17. Cited in Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind, 158.
18. Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind, 170.
19. Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind, 169
20. Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind, 170.
21. Cited in Arnauld Pierre, “The ‘Confrontation of Modern Values’: A Moral History of Dada in Paris,” The Dada Seminars, ed. Leah Dickerson (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2005), 242.
22. Pierre, “The ‘Confrontation of Modern Values.’”
23. Hugnet, “Dada in Paris,” 187.
24. Cited in Hugnet, 188.
25. Maurice Nadeau, The History of Surrealism, trans. Richard Howard (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 66.
26. Nadeau, The History of Surrealism.
27. Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind, 170.
28. Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind, 157.
29. Melzer, Dada and Surrealist Performance, 159.
30. Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind, 170–71.
31. Witkovsky, “Dada Breton,” 136.
32. Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind, 171.
33. Matthew Josephson, Life Among the Surrealists (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962), 148–49.
34. Josephson, Life Among the Surrealists, 149.
35. Josephson, Life Among the Surrealists.
36. Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind, 171.
37. Mike Sell, “Race,” Unpublished Manuscript. Used with permission of the author. This manuscript is part of Sell’s forthcoming book on key concepts in the avant-garde.
38. Josephson, Life Among the Surrealists, 149.
39. Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind, 171.
40. Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind.
41. Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind.
42. André Breton, Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Paragon House, 1993), 55.
43. Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind, 157.
44. Josephson, Life Among the Surrealists, 149.
45. Josephson, Life Among the Surrealists.
46. Roger Cardinal, “Review,” The Burlington Magazine 132 (October, 1990): 726.
47. Tristan Tzara, “Lecture on Dada. (1922),” in The Dada Painters and Poets, ed. Robert Motherwell (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 247.
48. Tzara, “Lecture on Dada,” 246.
49. Tzara, “Lecture on Dada,” 251.
50. Cardinal, “Review,” 726.
51. Josephson, Life Among the Surrealists, 149.
52. Pierre, “Moral History of Dada,” 242.
53. Josephson, Life Among the Surrealists, 149.
54. Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind, 185–86.
55. Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind, 171.
56. Tzara, L’Affaire Barrès, 38.
57. Annabelle Melzer, Dada and Surrealist Performance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 159.
58. Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind, 185.
59. André Breton, “After Dada,” in The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, 2nd ed., ed. Robert Motherwell (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 204.
60. Mike Sell, Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 13.
61. Sell, Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism, 37.
62. Paul Mann, “The Afterlife of the Avant-Garde,” Masocriticism (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999), 4.
63. Paul Mann, The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1991), 38.
64. Tzara, “Lecture on Dada,” 246.
65. Mann, Theory-Death, 39.
66. Mann, “Afterlife,” 3.
67. Breton, “After Dada,” 206.
68. Breton, “After Dada,” 204–5.
69. Breton, “After Dada,” 204.
70. Tristan Tzara, “manifesto on feeble love and bitter love,” in The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, 2nd ed., ed. Robert Motherwell (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 86.
71. Cited in Melzer, Dada and Surrealist Performance, xvi.
72. Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, “History of Dada,” in The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, 2nd ed., ed. Robert Motherwell (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 102.
73. Breton, “After Dada,” 204.
74. See for example Robert Motherwell, introduction to The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, 2nd ed., ed. Robert Motherwell (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981). xxxi.
75. Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, “Artichauts Nouveaux,” Le Coeur à barbe (April, 1922): 2
76. Pierre, “Moral History of Dada,” 249.
77. Indeed, Michel Sanouillet, whose 1965 study Dada à Paris is the definitive study of the Parisian Dadaists, notes that although there is some vagueness about the precise publication date of Le Coeur à barbe, certain allusions to the article “Lâchez tout” situate the journal’s publication after Breton’s article, which appeared on April 1. See Michel Sanouillet, Dada à Paris (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1965), 344.
78. Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind, 175.
79. Cited in Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind, 175.
80. Tristan Tzara, “manifesto on feeble love,” 92.
81. Anonymous, “Lâchez tout,” Le Coeur à barbe (April 1922): 5.
82. Anonymous, “Lâchez tout.”
83. Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind, 167.
84. Ruth Brandon, Surreal Lives (New York: Grove Press, 1999), 167.
85. Brandon, Surreal Lives, 167–68.
86. Brandon, Surreal Lives, 167.
87. Sanouillet, Dada à Paris, 383.
88. Josephson, Life Among the Surrealists, 152.
89. Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind, 192.
90. Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind.
91. Sanouillett, Dada à Paris, 386.
92. Witkovsky, “Dada Breton,” 136.
CHAPTER 2
1. John Cage, Interview with Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner, in Happenings and Other Acts, ed. Mariellen R. Sanford (New York: Routledge, 1995), 55.
2. Paul Mann, The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 81.
3. Yvonne Rainer, “Looking Myself in the Mouth,” October 17 (1981): 66.
4. Rainer, “Looking Myself in the Mouth,” 67.
5. Rainer, “Looking Myself in the Mouth,” 67; Richard Kostelanetz, John Cage (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970), 51.
6. Rainer, “Looking Myself in the Mouth,” 67–68.
7. Rainer, “Looking Myself in the Mouth,” 67.
8. One example of this optimism can be found in the attitude with which the American press received the anti-cultural sentiments of avant-garde artists after fascist Germany publically disavowed the avant-garde in the infamous 1937 Entartete Kunst exhibit. As Stephanie Barron has noted in her “European Artists in Exile,”
The reception accorded the artists whose work was banned by the Nazis was directly related to American attitudes toward Germany and the National Socialists. The American press responded with appropriate invective to the 1937 Entartete Kunst show in Munich. Thereafter, the meaning of modern art in America changed, and it was equated with the art of democracy. See Stephanie Barron, “European Artists in Exile: A Reading between the Lines,” in Exiles + Emigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler, ed. Stephanie Baron and Sabine Eckman (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1997), 26.
9. Mann, Theory-Death, 81.
10. The classic argument in this regard comes from Irving Sandler, who in The New York School: The Painters and Sculptures of the Fifties (New York: Harper and Row, 1978) devotes a chapter to the influence of what he specifically dubs “The Duchamp-Cage Aesthetic.” See Sandler, chapter 8.
11. Sandler, New York School, 164.
12. Though examples of such views are widespread, it is worth citing Richard Kostelanetz, who has long been one of Cage’s most ardent supporters. In his influential Theatre of Mixed Means (New York: Dial Press, 1968), Kostelanetz notes that “in America, among the greatest influences shaping the Theatre of Mixed Means are the ideas and examples of John Cage, who in the early fifties made the intellectual leap that connected all performed music with the theatre” (19). Among the more significant examples of this leap is Cage’s work at Black Mountain, which is the primary focus of this study.
13. Though scattered and fragmented translations of Artaud’s writing began to appear earlier, it was not until 1958 that Grove Press first published a complete translation of The Theatre and Its Double. In fact, it was Cage who, while at Black Mountain College, brought Artaud’s writing to the attention of Mary Caroline Richards, who became the English translator for the Grove Press edition of The Theatre and Its Double. See Martin Duberman, Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community (New York: Dutton, 1972), 350. Schwitter’s work, as well as that of other Dadaists, gained a substantial new audience when Robert Motherwell published The Dada Painters and Poets anthology in 1951 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), the year directly prior to Cage’s untitled piece at Black Mountain College.
14. As is well known, it was at The New School that Cage taught the legendary courses on composition, and the students in those courses became a virtual who’s who list for the Happenings and Fluxus movements. But even these courses arguably would not have become what they were without Cage’s prior involvement with Black Mountain, both as a faculty member and a performing artist. It is also worth noting the significance of these two specific institutions in the American cultivation of a transplanted European intelligentsia. These schools were the first to open their doors to the “intellectual refugees from Nazi Germany” (Barron, “European Artists in Exile,” 24).
15. Michael Kirby, Happenings (New York: Dutton, 1965), 31.
16. Interestingly enough, Cage’s own recollection does not always coincide with that of others who attended the event. Cage told Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner, for example, that he too gave his lecture on a ladder (Cage, “An Interview with Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner,” 53).
17. RoseLee Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (New York: Abrams, 1988), 126; Mary Emma Harris, The Arts at Black Mountain College (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 226.
18. Quoted in Duberman, Black Mountain, 351. Duberman’s Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community (1972) is the definitive study of Black Mountain College. Though Duberman’s concerns are primarily historical rather than aesthetic, his account of Cage’s untitled piece at Black Mountain is one of the very few accounts to emphasize how diverse and inconsistent are the recollections not only of those who participated but also of those who attended the event. Unfortunately, Duberman doesn’t consider these inconsistencies in terms of their artistic implications, but rather only in terms of the problems they present to the historian.
19. Duberman, Black Mountain, 351.
20. John Cage, Silence (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 12.
21. In this respect, both the institutional structure of Black Mountain and the intentional structure of Cage’s untitled performance piece coincide with the concluding sentiments that Herbert Marcuse expressed a decade later, albeit with the increasingly militant tone of the time, in One Dimensional Man: “To liberate the imagination so that it can be given all its means of expression presupposes the repression of much that is now free and that perpetuates a repressive society” (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 250.
22. Duberman, Black Mountain, 102.
23. Cage, Silence, 12.
24. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Free Press, 1997), 205.
25. Dewey, Democracy, 195, 85.
26. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigee Trade, 2005), 42.
27. Dewey, Art, 62.
28. On this point, see Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde [1974] (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 57.
29. This tendency was widespread and by no means limited to the theatrical community. In the introductory essay “Considering (and Reconsidering) Art and Exile” that Sabine Eckmann wrote for the anthology Exiles + Emigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler, she notes how many of the European Exiles arriving on the American shores went through a process of “deradicalization” (a term she borrows from Martin Jay). See especially pages 34–35 of her article. Sabine Eckmann, “Considering (and Reconsidering) Art and Exile,” in Exiles + Emigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1997), 30–42.
30. Quoted in Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 62.
31. Flippo Tommaso Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” in Modernism, ed. Vassiliki Kolocontroni, Jane Goldman, and Olga Taxidou (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 251.
32. Marcel Duchamp, The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Da Capo Press, 1973), 140.
33. Quoted in Richard Kostelanetz, Conversing With Cage (New York: Limelight, 1989), 22.
34. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in Perceptions and Judgements, 1939–1944, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1986), 12.
35. Clement Greenberg, “Counter-Avant-Garde,” in Marchel Duchamp in Perspective, ed. Joseph Masheck (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1975), 124, 127.
36. Mann, Theory-Death, 81.
37. Those trappings were the trappings of all aesthetic negation: namely, the tendency to inadvertently reinscribe the very cultural structures one seeks to negate.
38. Roger Reynolds, “Interview with John Cage,” in John Cage, ed. Robert Dunn (New York: Henmar Press, 1962), 47.
39. Poggioli, Theory, 61–62.
40. Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), 146.
41. Though it is a bit of a stretch, it might well be worth considering the extent to which Cage’s comments reflect the enduring image in the American cultural mentality of the ever-present frontier waiting to be cultivated. Interestingly enough, this image of abundance, however false and ideologically charged it may be, stands in marked contrast, say, to the Nazi rallying call for the creation of Lebensraum, a call that openly sought the creation of “German” space at the expense or negation of other peoples and cultures.
42. Cage most clearly associates avant-garde aesthetics with alternative spaces in his “Lecture on Nothing,” where he specifically attributes his own status as a member of the “avant-garde” to his engagement not with tonality but with the intervals between tones, i.e., with the silences that, historically, have been defined negatively as the absence of tone and/or sound. In an echo of Dewey’s positive reconceptualization of the negative view of play within the logic of capitalism, Cage—who admits, “I never liked tonality”—reconceptualizes these intervals affirmatively as the presence of sounds and/or noises that a regressive mode of hearing fails to “intellectualize,” or, in other words, fails to perceive (Silence, 116). He notes, furthermore: “I found that I liked noises even more than I liked intervals” (117). This discovered preference leads Cage down a path, in his art, of accentuating what he then can assume always already exists, but which historically has been neglected—hence his predilection for the affirmative and his affinity with Dewey. For like Dewey’s affirming embrace of play, Cage’s aesthetic path is a counter-affirmation to the negative deafness of tonality. But as is the case with his accentuation of the affirmative, Cage’s struggle is not directly with or against tonality. It is rather with the aesthetic harnessing of the overlooked presence of noise in what we perceive as silence.
43. Kostelanetz, Mixed Means, 54.
44. Asserting the relation of Cage’s aesthetics to Dewey’s is, in fact, not without precedent. In the midst of the flurry of American avant-garde performance activities that were taking place in 1968, for example, Van Meter Ames published a short study entitled “From John Dewey to John Cage,” in which he argues that “Cage out-does Dewey in bridging the difference between life and art” (Van Meter Ames, “From John Dewey to John Cage,” in Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Aesthetics, ed. Rudolf Zeitler [Uppsala, 1972], 738). Unfortunately, Ames neither draws connections between Dewey’s philosophies of education and art, nor does he address experimental communities like Black Mountain College, which, as I argue here, provides the clearest connection between Dewey and Cage.
45. Moira Roth, “The Aesthetics of Indifference,” Artforum 16 (1977): 49.
46. David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 2–3.
47. Duberman, Black Mountain, 346.
48. Amelia Jones, Postmodernism and the En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 30.
49. Roth, “Indifference,” 49.
50. Reynolds, “Interview with John Cage,” 47.
51. Quoted in Kostelanetz, Mixed Means, 57.
52. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 84.
53. Dewey, Art as Experience, 52.
54. Dewey, Art as Experience, 45; Education and Democracy, 140.
55. The French exile Amédéé Ozenfant, for example, who was “the founder of the Purist movement in France,” and who lectured at the college in the summer of 1944, noted both the college’s anomalous status in American society and its role as a refuge for displaced members of the German avant-garde. He “described the college as ‘a petite university, isolated in nature like a Benedictine abbey,’” and “as ‘one of the new centers of German culture’ in America” (quoted in Harris, Arts at Black Mountain, 96). The new center of German culture to which Ozenfant referred was the product of an affiliation with exiled members of the Bauhaus that dated back to the college’s founding.
56. Cage was in fact quite familiar with Bauhaus. Prior to the summer of 1952 when he orchestrated his untitled piece, Cage already had established contacts with exiled members of the Bauhaus, having taught “music at László Moholy-Nagy’s Chicago Bauhaus” in 1942 and having developed a fairly good rapport with Josef Albers when Albers invited him to be part of the summer faculty at Black Mountain in 1948. See Richard Kostelanetz, John Cage (New York: De Capo Press, 1991), 4; Harris, Arts at Black Mountain, 146.
57. Richard Kostelanetz, Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes (Chicago: Cappella Books, 1993), 23.
58. Kostelanetz, Mixed Means, 13.
59. Harris, Arts at Black Mountain, 15.
60. Josef Albers, “Art as Experience,” Progressive Education 12, no. 6 (1935): 391.
61. Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 53.
62. Duberman, Black Mountain, 324.
63. When Cage and Cunningham visited the college for the first time in 1948, for example, Albers and Cage agreed considerably on questions of aesthetics. But as Mary Harris notes, Cage had not yet discovered the I Ching or incorporated chance operational procedures into his work, developments “which were anathema to Albers’s emphasis on discipline and control.” See Harris, Arts at Black Mountain, 146.
64. Harris, Arts at Black Mountain, 10; Cage, Quoted in Marjorie Perloff, “‘A Duchamp Unto My Self’: ‘Writing Through’ Marcel,” in John Cage: Composed in America, ed. Marjorie Perloff and Charles Junkerman (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1994), 113.
65. When Schawinsky arrived at Black Mountain, he already had a long list of Bauhaus experimental theatrical productions behind him at Weimar, Berlin, and Dressau, and the courses he offered in the late thirties at Black Mountain in “Stage Studies,” which he listed as “not intended as training for any particular branch of the contemporary theatre but rather as a general study of the fundamental phenomena: Space, form, color, light, sound, music, movement, time, etc.,” might very well be characterized as precursors to the courses that Cage subsequently taught in composition at the New School in the fifties (Xanti Schwinsky, “From the Bauhaus to Black Mountain,” TDR 15, no. 3 [1971]: 44).
66. Schawinsky “From the Bauhaus to Black Mountain,” 39.
67. Oskar Schlemmer, “Man and Art Figure,” in The Theater of the Bauhaus, ed. Walter Gropius and Arthur Wensinger (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1996), 32.
68. Harris, Arts at Black Mountain, 40.
69. Natalie Crohn Schmitt, “‘So Many Things Can Go Together’: the Theatricality of John Cage,” New Theatre Quarterly 11, no. 41 (1995): 72.
70. Schawinsky, “From the Bauhaus to Black Mountain,” 43.
71. Benjamin Buchloh, “Theorizing the Avant-Garde,” Art in America 72, no. 10 (1984): 19.
72. Miklos Szabolcsi, “Avant-Garde, Neo-Avant-Garde, Modernism: Questions and Suggestions,” New Literary History 3, no. 1 (1971): 60.
73. Szabolcsi, “Avant-Garde,” 63–64.
CHAPTER 3
1. Glenna Syse in the Chicago Sun Times, January 11, 1966, cited in Donald Glut, The Frankenstein Legend: A Tribute to Mary Shelley and Boris Karloff (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1973), 51–52.
2. The Village Voice, September 12, 1968, p. 38.
3. Arthur Danto, Encounters and Reflections (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990), 289.
4. Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1975), 11.
5. For the seminal theoretical discussion of these ties, see Renato Poggioli, Theory of the Avant-Garde [1962], trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 43–59. Echoes of Poggioli’s arguments are to be found in Matei Calinescu’s Five Faces of Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), 100–108; and, more recently, in the opening chapter of Richard Murphy’s Theorizing the Avant-Garde (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
6. In an amusing allusion to Shelley’s novel, the Baron’s wife (played by Monique van Vooren) is also the Baron’s blood sister. They have two children who haunt the film as they wander the castle unsupervised. In the novel, of course, Elizabeth, killed by the creature on the night of her wedding to Victor Frankenstein, is Victor’s un-officially adopted sister. Incest is thus only indirectly implied, and Victor and Elizabeth have no children.
7. Joan Hawkins, Cutting Edge: Art Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 192.
8. Margaret Croyden, Lunatics, Lovers and Poets (New York: McGraw Hill, 1974), 97.
9. Saul Gottlieb, “The Living Theatre in Exile: Mysteries, Frankenstein,” TDR 10, no. 4 [T32] (1966): 145.
10. We, the Living Theatre (New York: Ballantine Books, 1970), 112.
11. Paracelsus had served as a source of inspiration to Victor Frankenstein in Shelley’s novel. Historically, he was a transitional figure involved in modernizing medicine by treating illnesses with chemicals, while nonetheless embracing notions drawn from alchemy and mysticism. Indeed, Paracelsus believed that alchemy could actually create humans.
12. Gottlieb, “Living Theatre in Exile,” 148.
13. Croyden, Lunatics, 99.
14. Accounts by Biner and Neff indicate Frankenstein, rather than the creature, as the instigator of the prison revolt. But the implications for the body politic are the same. See Pierre Biner, The Living Theatre (New York: Horizon Press, 1972), 137–38; Renfrew Neff, The Living Theatre: USA (New York: Bobbs-Merril Co., 1970), 71–72.
15. Croyden, Lunatics, 101.
16. Croyden, Lunatics.
17. Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1958), 13.
18. Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, 110–11.
19. Hawkins, Cutting Edge, 171. Hawkins notes that unlike other films Morrissey made while associated with Warhol, Frankenstein did not literally carry Warhol’s name as producer. There is a kind of playfulness here that Hawkins overlooks. The film, which is full of allusions to other Frankenstein films, subtly associates Warhol himself with the Frankenstein creature in the absence of Warhol’s name in the credits. (Boris Karloff’s name was absent in Whale’s Frankenstein as well.) The list of characters includes the reference to “the Monster,” but that reference is followed by question marks, as if to suggest that any number of people could be the Monster.
20. Hawkins, Cutting Edge.
21. Julian Beck, “3 Stages in the Genesis of Frankenstein: A Drama Spectacle Created by the Living Theatre Company,” City Lights Journal, Number Three (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1966), 58.
22. Beck, “3 Stages in the Genesis of Frankenstein.”
23. Brown was the playwright who penned the script for the Living Theatre’s infamous production of The Brig.
24. Kenneth H. Brown, “Frankenstein and the Birth of the Monster,” City Lights Journal, Number Three (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1966), 51.
25. Gottlieb served as the Living Theatre’s agent and representative in New York during their exile.
26. Gottlieb, “The Living Theatre in Exile,” 145.
27. Gottlieb, “The Living Theatre in Exile,” 137.
28. It is worth noting in this regard that Beck had already published poetry in City Lights Journal, Number Two, which Ferlinghetti had published in 1964. To this earlier second issue of the journal, Beck had contributed an anti-war poem entitled “Daily Life.”
29. Arthur Danto, Encounters and Reflections (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990), 292, 289.
30. Danto, Encounters and Reflections, 289.
31. Danto, Encounters and Reflections.
32. Albert LaValley, “The Stage and Film Children of Frankenstein: A Survey,” in The Endurance of Frankenstein, ed. George Lavine and U.C. Knoepflmacher (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 282.
33. This description is drawn from a variety of accounts of the performances (including the footage that was broadcast on German television in 1966), but it is primarily indebted to Saul Gottlieb’s account in “The Living Theatre in Exile.” See his essay in TDR 10, no. 4: 147.
34. Pierre Biner, The Living Theatre, 208 [italics mine].
35. Renato Poggioli, Theory of the Avant-Garde [1962], trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 46.
36. Poggioli, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 50.
37. Poggioli, Theory of the Avant-Garde.
38. Marlon B. Ross, “Romantic Quest and Conquest,” in Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 29.
39. LaValley, “Stage and Film Children,” 246.
40. Anne K. Mellor, “Possessing Nature: the Female in Frankenstein” in Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 221.
41. There is pretty clear documentation of this decision. Johanna Smith, for example, has noted that Shelley expressed deep anxieties in her letters about the biased reception her work might receive if her name stood as author directly beneath the title. Indeed, as an author, Shelley labored in a period where the “spheres of writing and literacy” and the production of what Shelley called “print-worthy dignity” were presumed to be “the product[s] of a public-school and university education, available at this time only to men.” See Johanna M. Smith, “‘Cooped up’ with ‘Sad Trash’: Domesticity and the Sciences in Frankenstein,” Frankenstein 2nd ed. Johanna M. Smith (New York: Bedford, 2000), 316.
42. In this regard, it is helpful to rehearse the clichéd banter between two visitors to a museum. One responds to Warhol’s Campbell soup cans by saying, “I could have done that.” The other, in an implicit acknowledgment of Warhol’s brilliance, replies, “Yes, but you didn’t.”
43. Donald Drew Egbert, Social Radicalism and the Arts (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), 404.
CHAPTER 4
1. Rebecca Schneider, “Reactuals: From Personal to Critical and Back,” in The Rise of Performance Studies: Rethinking Richard Schechner’s Broad Spectrum, ed. James M. Harding and Cindy Rosenthal (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 137.
2. Richard Schechner, The Future of Ritual (New York: Routledge, 1993), 5, 18.
3. Schechner, The Future of Ritual, 17.
4. Rustom Bharucha, “A Collision of Cultures: Some Western Interpretations of Indian Theatre,” Asian Theatre Journal 1, no. 1 (1984): 14.
5. Bharucha, “A Collision of Cultures.”
6. Rustom Bharucha, “Reply to Richard Schechner,” Asian Theatre Journal 1, no. 2 (1984): 256.
7. Richard Schechner, “A Reply to Rustom Bharucha,” Asian Theatre Journal 1, no. 2 (1984): 247.
8. Schechner, “A Reply to Rustom Bharucha.”
9. Schechner, “Reply to Rustom Bharucha,” 250.
10. Schechner, “A Reply to Rustom Bharucha,” 252.
11. Richard Schechner, “From Ritual to Theatre and Back: The Structure / Process of the Efficacy-Entertainment Dyad,” Educational Theatre Journal 26, no. 4 (1974): 476.
12. Bertolt Brecht, “The Street Scene,” in Performance Analysis: An Introductory Coursebook, ed. Colin Counsell and Laurie Wolf (New York: Routledge, 2001), 47.
13. Schechner, “Reply to Rustom Bharucha,” 252.
14. Bharucha, “Reply to Richard Schechner,” 255.
15. Brook’s travels in India and his dealings with his Indian hosts are infamous for their destructive disregard for the particular individuals involved and for the general lack of respect Brook showed for the cultural traditions and theater practices that his hosts were kind enough to arrange for him to observe. The two most thorough accounts of Brook’s rather arrogant dealings with Indian culture are Phillip Zarilli’s “The Aftermath: When Peter Brook Came to India,” TDR 30, no. 1 (1986): 92–99, and Alf Hiltebeitel’s “Transmitting Mahabharatas: Another Look at Peter Brook,” TDR 36, no. 3 (1992): 131–59.
16. With regard to the uniting of poststructuralist and Brechtian theories, I am thinking particularly of the work of Janelle Reinelt and Elin Diamond. Their complementary projects of merging poststructuralist thought with Brechtian aesthetics are specifically aimed at establishing a critical feminist discourse for theater studies. In citing their work in this context, I am implicitly suggesting that the combination of poststructuralism and Brechtian aesthetics has wide-sweeping political implications for the work that we do as theater scholars.
17. Una Chaudhuri, “Working Out (of) Place,” in Staging Resistance, ed. Jeanne Colleran and Jenny S. Spencer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 77.
18. Chaudhuri, “Working Out (of) Place,” 78. It is worth noting that Chaudhuri’s call to move beyond a “personal denigration” of Brook coincides with long-standing ways of regarding Brecht and the gross contrasts between his personal and artistic politics. Elizabeth Wright, for example, argues forcefully against dismissing Brecht based upon ad hominem attacks that note “the contradictions between his life and his art.” Indeed, Wright argues that Brecht’s “undoubted opportunism” ought not “be held indiscriminately against him when a critical survey of his achievements as a writer is being conducted.” See Elizabeth Wright, Postmodern Brecht (New York: Routledge, 1989), 9.
19. Chaudhuri, “Working Out (of) Place,” 94.
20. Wright, Postmodern Brecht, 19.
21. Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method (New York: Verso, 1998), 38.
22. Leonard C. Pronko, “Los Angeles Festival: Peter Brook’s The Mahabharata,” Asian Theatre Journal 5, no. 2 (1988): 220.
23. Peter Brook, foreword to The Mahabharata: A Play, by Jean-Claude Carrière, trans. Peter Brook (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), xvi.
24. Schechner, “Reply to Rustom Bharucha,” 248.
25. This is in fact precisely the point Liza Henderson attempted to underscore in 1988 when she argued “far from transcending the socio-political structures of history, Brook reflects one of its more regrettable trends, once again selling the East to the West.” See Liza Henderson, “Brook’s Point,” Theater 19, no. 2 (1988): 37. This same sentiment is echoed in Gabrielle Cody’s polemical assertion that “in the spirit of the British Raj, Brook views Hinduism through the generosity of a conqueror’s eyes, admiring its spirituality, naively reveling in its exoticism.” See Gabrielle Cody, “Art of Awe’s Sake,” Theater 19, no. 2 (1988): 32.
26. This is the underlying assumption, for example, in Una Chaudhuri’s discussion of the “mission” of Brook’s production: “But Brook’s mission was inevitably framed by his own philosophical vision, which for all its intercultural investments, is a Western humanist one. At its heart lies the belief that Truth is universal and singular, and that this Truth can be recovered from certain stories of other cultures—no matter how strange and unfamiliar their outer form.” See Chaudhuri, “Working Out (of) Place,” 83.
27. Gautam Dasgupta, “The Mahabharata: Peter Brook’s Orientalism,” in Interculturalism and Performance, ed. Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Dasgupta (New York: PAJ Publications, 1991), 80.
28. Indeed, Margaret Eddershaw argues that unusual linguistic structures are a staple of Brechtian techniques to attract the attention of the audience: “The Brechtian performer’s playing . . . is aided not just by the text’s wholesale changes in dramaturgical style but by, for example, the detailed distancing effects created through the use of unusual vocabulary and linguistic structures that are designed to catch the spectator’s ear and make them take special note.” See Margaret Eddershaw, Performing Brecht (New York: Routledge, 1996), 15.
29. Peter Brook, “Talking with Peter Brook: Interviews by Richard Schechner, Mathilde La Bardoniie, Joël Jouanneau, and George Banu,” TDR 30, no. 1 (1986): 61.
30. Janelle Reinelt, After Brecht: British Epic Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 90.
31. Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht (London: New Left Books, 1977), 11.
32. David Williams, “Theatre of Innocence and of Experience,” in Peter Brook and the Mahabharata, ed. David Williams (New York: Routledge, 1991), 23.
33. Quoted in Martine Millon, “Talking with Three Actors,” TDR 30, no. 1 (1986): 85.
34. Glenn Loney, for example, recalls Brook’s own sense of surprise at Frank Rich’s specific disappointment in this regard: “To cap his condemnations, Rich observed: ‘For all the Eastern exotica, the stagings and the script still end up accentuating the common ground shared by “The Mahabharata” and the West’. For Peter Brook, this was an astonishing comment, primarily because it is couched as a quibble, an objection, an evidence of a shortcoming, even of a failure in the production. And yet, what Rich perceived was in fact what Brook had hoped would be intuited.” See Glenn Loney, “Myth and Music: Resonances Across the Continents and Centuries,” Theater 19, no. 2 (1988): 23.
35. Maria Shevtsova, “Interaction-Interpretation: The Mahabharata from a Socio-Cultural Perspective,” in Peter Brook and the Mahabharata, ed. David Williams, 222.
36. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 137.
37. Rustom Bharucha, “Peter Brook’s Mahabharata: A View from India,” Theater 19, no. 2 (1988): 8.
38. Some sense of this inability is evident in Gary Williams’ rather pithy and to my mind accurate characterization of the Western registers working within Brook’s adaptation: “The Mahabharata offers a Western existentializing of Eastern mythology at the same time that it is fleeing from the spiritual poverty of the West. It comes with Greenpeace warnings against the dangers of seeking ‘pasupata,’ the ultimate weapon, together with intimations that the best human kind may hope for is an endless cycle of meaninglessness in the garden of Godot.” See Gary Jay Williams, “From The Dream to The Mahabharata: or, Draupadi in the Deli,” Theater 19, no. 2 (1988): 31.
39. Dasgupta, “The Mahabharata: Peter Brook’s Orientalism,” 79, 78.
40. Loney, “Myth and Music,” 26.
41. Janelle Reinelt, “Rethinking Brecht: Deconstruction, Feminism and the Politics of Form,” The Brecht Yearbook 15 (1990): 100.
42. Bharucha, “Peter Brook’s Mahabharata,” 9, 10.
43. Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 181.
44. Jacques Derrida, “The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation,” Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 235.
45. W. B. Worthen, “Disciplines of the Text / Sites of Performance,” TDR 39, no.1 (1995): 22.
46. Bharucha, “Peter Brook’s Mahabharata,” 8.
47. Bruce McConachie, “Towards a Postpositivist Theatre History,” Theatre Journal 37, no. 4 (1985): 478.
48. Worthen, “Disciplines,” 22.
49. Worthen, “Disciplines.”
50. In this respect, the critique of Brook’s production falls in line with notions of performance belonging to a long-standing tradition within literary criticism that considers meaning to reside in text rather than in performance. As W. B. Worthen has argued “literary engagements with performativity tend to focus on the performative function of language as represented in literary texts, and much performance-oriented criticism of drama, for all its invocation of the theatre, similarly betrays a desire to locate the meanings of the stage in the contours of the dramatic text.” See W. B. Worthen, “Drama, Performativity, and Performance,” PMLA 113, no. 5 (1998): 1093.
51. Dasgupta, “The Mahabharata: Peter Brook’s Orientalism,” 76.
52. Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, 19.
53. Chaudhuri, “Working Out (of) Place,” 82–83.
54. It is worth noting how this Brechtian notion of interruption coincides with the evolution of the concept of performance that Dwight Conquergood traces in “Of Caravans and Carnivals.” Interestingly enough, according to Conquergood, the Brechtian notion of interruption finds an echo in the postcolonial theories of Homi Bhabha. “Now, the current thinking about performance constitutes a shift from poiesis to kinesis. Turner’s important work on the productive capacities of performance set the stage for a more poststructuralist and political emphasis on performance as kinesis, as movement, motion, fluidity, fluctuation, all those restless energies that transgress boundaries and trouble closure. Thus, postcolonial critic Homi K. Bhabha deployed the term ‘performative’ to refer to action that incessantly insinuates, interrupts, interrogates, antagonizes, and decenters powerful master discourses, which he dubbed ‘pedagogical’. From Turner’s emphatic view of performance as making not faking, we move to Bhabha’s politically urgent view of performance as breaking and remaking.” See Dwight Conquergood, “Of Caravans and Carnivals,” TDR 39, no. 4 (1995): 138.
55. Chaudhuri “Working Out (of) Place,” 85.
56. Bharucha, “Peter Brook’s Mahabharata,” 8.
57. Chaudhuri, “Working Out (of) Place,” 93.
58. Indeed, Kent Devereaux notes that “what is [perhaps] most striking about Peter Brook’s The Mahabharata is its purposeful abstention from psychological drama.” See Kent Devereaux, “Peter Brook’s Production of The Mahabharata at the Brooklyn Academy of Music,” Asian Theatre Journal 5, no. 2 (1988): 230.
59. Jameson, Brecht and Method, 53.
60. This quotation comes from Brook’s 1988 film of the play, The Mahabharata, directed by Peter Brook (1988, Parabola Films).
61. Cited in Bharucha, “Peter Brook’s Mahabharata,” 9.
62. Cited in Chaudhuri, “Working Out (of) Place,” 89.
63. Chaudhuri, “Working Out (of) Place,” 89.
64. Just one among the many examples of this tendency is Roger Long’s complaint: “I was disappointed in that I was not more intensely involved in the emotions of the individual characters.” See Roger Long, “Peter Brook’s The Mahabharata: A Personal Reaction,” Asian Theatre Journal 5, no. 2 (1988): 233.
65. This is in fact where some of Brook’s most famous defenders leave the matter. Patrice Pavis, for example, in his defense of Brook has called attention to the “universal transcultural factors” that in Brook’s production supposedly convey “the symbolic terrain of humanity as a whole.” See Patrice Pavis, Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, trans. Loren Kruger (New York: Routledge, 1992), 187.
66. Bharucha, “Peter Brook’s Mahabharata,” 8.
67. In this respect, Brook’s behavior ironically echoes the character of Śakuni, whose cheating at dice has lasting and devastating consequences. Śakuni’s cunning manipulation of the dice is one of the few unambiguous moments of villainy in The Mahabharata. Defying the random possibilities of the game, Śakuni’s manipulations of the dice have ramifications well beyond whatever personal gain he may hope to obtain. Indeed, Śakuni’s cheating is so despicable precisely because his actions not only destroy his direct relations with those whom he cheats, but they also destroy the Pāndavas’s relations with their family (e.g., with Dhritarashtra and the Kauravas), their colleagues (e.g., Drona) and their community (e.g., the Pāndavas’s kingdom).
68. Cited in Bharucha, “Peter Brook’s Mahabharata,” 19. This is but one aspect of Meduri’s blunt critique of Zarrilli’s piece. Maduri criticizes Zarrilli for focusing too exclusively on matters of courtesy and form when larger economic and political issues are at stake: “The article [Zarrilli’s “Aftermath: When Peter Brook Came to India”] does not address the deeper, larger philosophical issues of self-responsibility and of the part in relation to the whole. Neither does it acknowledge the capitalistic vested interest of the West in coming to the East and vice versa. It chooses instead to focus on the external manifestations of form, courtesy, and consideration that Peter Brook and his company ignored.” See Avanthi Meduri, “More Aftermath After Peter Brook,” TDR 32, no. 2 (1988): 14.
69. John Rouse, “Brecht and the Question of the Audience,” The Brecht Yearbook 15 (1990): 113.
70. Brook, “Talking with Peter Brook: Interviews,” 62, 63.
71. Though without regard to his Brechtian function, Vyasa’s pivotal significance in the narrative of The Mahabharata has been recognized before. Nora Alter, for example, has noted the following: “Like any omnipotent author, he [Vyasa] has the ability to intervene as a character in his own story. . . . He redirects the action, and intervenes on several occasions when the poem does not follow what he considers to be its proper course, interjecting authorial remarks.” See Nora Alter, “Peter Brook’s Mahabharata: Orality and Literacy,” Theater Three 6 (1989): 161.
72. This quotation comes from Brook’s 1988 film of the play. The Mahabharata, directed by Peter Brook (1988, Parabola Films).
73. Worthen, “Disciplines,” 15.
74. Derrida, “The Theatre of Cruelty,” 235.
75. Derrida, “The Theatre of Cruelty,” 234.
76. Worthen, “Disciplines,” 17.
77. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Image / Music / Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Noonday Press, 1977), 148.
78. Barthes, “The Death of the Author.”
79. Peter Brook, The Empty Space (New York: Atheneum, 1968), 72.
80. Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 79, 78.
CHAPTER 5
1. Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance (New York: Routledge, 1997), 139.
2. Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary, trans. Ann Raimes, ed. John Elderfield (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 70.
3. Richard Huelsenbeck, Memoirs of a Dada Drummer, trans. Joachim Neugroschel, ed. Hans J. Kleinschmidt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 9.
4. Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958).
5. The original version of this chapter was in fact the lead essay in that collection.
6. Paul Mann, The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 81.
7. Mann, The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde.
8. Michael Kirby, The Art of Time (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1969), 18.
9. While far less polemical than his critique of Schechner, Rustom Bharucha’s discussion of Artaud in “The Collision of Cultures” provides an especially helpful commentary on Artaud’s notion of “oriental theatre.” See Bharucha, “A Collision of Cultures: Some Western Interpretations of Indian Theatre,” Asian Theatre Journal 1, no. 1 (1984): 3-4.
10. Schneider, Explicit Body, 129.
11. Schneider, Explicit Body, 134.
12. Schneider, Explicit Body, 129.
13. Richard Schechner, The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993), 6.
14. Christopher Innes, Avant-Garde Theatre 1892–1992 (New York: Routledge, 1993), 18.
15. Michal Kobialka, Of Borders and Thresholds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 3.
16. Kobialka, Of Borders and Thresholds.
17. Mike Sell has taken scholarly steps to redress this problem in his recent book Avant-Garde: Race, Religion, War (Segull, 2011), which takes a sociological approach to the avant-garde as a broad historical phenomenon rather than as a specific kind of artistic movement.
18. Kobialka, Of Borders and Thresholds, 3.
19. Alejandro Lugo, “Reflections on Border Theory,” Border Theory: the Limits of Cultural Politics, ed. Scott Michaelsen and David E. Johnson (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1997), 45.
20. Lugo, “Reflections on Border Theory,” 49.
21. Lugo, “Reflections on Border Theory,” 54.
22. Lugo, “Reflections on Border Theory,” 50.
23. Diana Taylor, “Transculturating Transculturation,” in Interculturalism and Performance, ed. Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Dasgupta (New York: PAJ, 1991), 63.
24. Michael Richardson, introduction to Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean (London: Verso, 1996), 4.
25. Paul Laraque, “Andre Breton in Haiti,” Refusal of the Shadow, 212.
26. Masao Miyoshi, “A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of the Nation-State,” Critical Inquiry 19, no. 3 (1993): 728.
27. John Carlos Rowe, “Nineteenth-Century United States Literary Culture and Transnationality,” PMLA 118, no. 1 (2003): 78.
28. Miyoshi, “A Borderless World?,” 734.
29. Miyoshi, “A Borderless World?,” 751.
30. Renato Poggioli, Theory of the Avant-Garde (1962), trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 106–7.
31. Miyoshi, “A Borderless World?,” 751.
32. Taylor, “Transculturating Transculturation,” 67.
33. Rowe, “Literary Culture and Transnationality,” 78.
34. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 111.
35. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 112.
36. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 205.
37. de Man, Allegories of Reading, 113–14.
38. Edward Said, “Traveling Theory,” The World, The Text and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 226.
CHAPTER 6
1. Mike Sell, Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 13.
2. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 57.
3. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (New York: Verso, 1974), 43.
4. Sell, Avant-Garde Performance, 37.
5. David Savran, “The Death of the Avant-Garde,” TDR 49.3 (2005): 12.
6. Richard Schechner, “The Decline and Fall of the (American) Avant-Garde: Why It Happened and What We Can Do about It,” Part 1, Performing Arts Journal 5, no. 2 (1981): 48–63; “The Decline and Fall of the (American) Avant-Garde: Why It Happened and What We Can Do about It,” Part 2, Performing Arts Journal 5, no. 3 (1981): 9–19. Schechner republished the essay in The End of Humanism: Writings on Performance (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982).
7. Arnold Aronson, American Avant-Garde Theatre: A History (New York: Routledge, 2000), 181.
8. Aronson, American Avant-Garde Theatre: A History.
9. See Richard Schechner, “The Conservative Avant-Garde,” New Literary History 41, no. 4 (2010): 895–913.
10. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 256.
11. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”
12. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott. (New York: Verso, 1974), 151.
13. Richard Schechner, The Future of Ritual (New York: Routledge, 1995), 8.
14. Schechner, The Future of Ritual.
15. Allan Kaprow, “Happenings in the New York Scene,” in The Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 19.
16. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 256.
17. Renato Poggioli, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 100–101.
18. Erika Munk, “Only Connect: The Living Theatre and Its Audiences,” in Re-staging the Sixties, ed. James Harding and Cindy Rosenthal (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 46.
19. Munk, “Only Connect,” 46.
20. Judith Malina, The Enormous Despair (New York: Random House, 1972).
21. With regard specifically to the Living Theatre, one notable exception is Cindy Rosenthal’s recent article, “The Living Theatre’s Arrested Development in Brazil: An Intersection of Activist Performances,” in Avant-Garde Performance and Material Exchange, ed. Mike Sell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
22. Richard Schechner, “Who Killed Cock Robin?,” Tulane Drama Review 8, no. 3 (1964): 11.
23. Passage from Bottoms as well as quote from Deleuze and Guattari are taken from Stephen Bottoms, “The Tangled Flora of Goat Island: Rhizome, Repetition, Reality,” Theatre Journal 50, no. 4 (1998): 434.
24. Mike Sell, Avant-Garde: Race, Religion, War (Dehli: Seagull Press, 2011).
25. Schechner, “The Decline and Fall,” Part 1, 49.
26. See the description of The Riot Group’s mission on their website: http://www.theriotgroup.com/?page_id=11, accessed December 11, 2010.
27. Statement on The Riot Group in Adriano Shaplin’s The Riot Group: Pugilist Specialist. (London: Oberon Books, 2003), 4. In that same statement, The Riot Group explains: “All Riot Group performance texts are written by Adriano Shaplin with roles tailored to each individual actor. Each production is collaboratively directed and designed by the cast.”
28. Shaplin, Pugilist Specialist, 26.
29. Shaplin, Pugilist Specialist, 22.
30. Shaplin, Pugilist Specialist, 20.
31. Catherine Lotrionte, “When to Target Leaders,” The Washington Quarterly 26, no. 3 (2003): 74. Lotrionte notes that Presidents Carter and Reagan both issued executive orders reaffirming Ford’s original executive order. The policy was rejected by President George W. Bush. Unlike his Father, President George H.W. Bush, who rejected the idea of directly targeting Saddam Hussein, the younger Bush opened the second Gulf War with bombing raids that specifically set out to eliminate Hussein.
32. Shaplin, Pugilist Specialist, 78, 80.
33. Shaplin, Pugilist Specialist, 81.
34. Shaplin, Pugilist Specialist, 14, 17.
35. Jennifer D. Kibbe, “The Rise of the Shadow Warriors,” Foreign Affairs 83, no. 2 (2004): 104.
36. Kibbe, “The Rise of the Shadow Warriors.”
37. Samuel Weber, “War, Terrorism and Spectacle: On Towers and Caves,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 3 (2002): 449.
38. Weber, “War, Terrorism and Spectacle.”
39. Fredric Jameson, “The Dialectics of Disaster,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 2 (2002): 301.
40. Jameson, “The Dialectics of Disaster.”
41. Karlheinz Stockhausen, “‘Huuuh!’ Das Pressegespräch am 16. September 2001 im Senatszimmer des Hotel Atlantic in Hamburg,” Musik Text 91 (2001): 76–77. The original German reads: “das größte Kunstwerk, was es je gegeben hat.”
42. Jameson, “Dialectics of Disaster,” 303.
43. Stockhausen, “‘Huuuh!’,” 77. The original German reads “Der Verbrecher ist es deshalb, das wissen Sie ja, weil die Menschen nicht einverstanden waren.”
44. Richard Schechner, “9/11 as Avant-Garde Art?” PMLA 124, no. 5 (2009): 1825.
45. Schechner, “9/11 as Avant-Garde Art?”
46. All citations are taken from the manuscript of Mike Sell’s forthcoming article, to be published by Modernism / Modernity. The quote is from comments that bin Laden made on Al Jazeera television (via video) within hours of the US invasion of Afghanistan, and which were later published in an article the New York Times, “The Sword Fell,” October 8, 2001.
47. David LeHardy Sweet, “Edward Said and the Avant-Garde,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 25 (2005): 171.
48. Jameson “Dialectics of Disaster,” 303.
49. Masao Miyoshi, “A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of the Nation-State,” Critical Inquiry 19, no. 4 (1993): 726–51.
50. Miyoshi, “A Borderless World?,” 728.
51. Miyoshi, “A Borderless World?”
52. Savran, “Death of the Avant-Garde,” 10.
53. Suzan-Lori Parks, The America Play and Other Works (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995), 163.
54. Parks, The America Play and Other Works, 4.
55. Parks, The America Play and Other Works, 164.
56. Miyoshi, “A Borderless World?,” 729.
57. Miyoshi, “A Borderless World?,” 747.
58. Molly Smith, “Introduction to Anthems: Culture Clash in the District,” Culture Clash in AmeriCCa (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2003), 154.
59. Richard Montoya and Culture Clash, Anthems: Culture Clash in the District, Culture Clash in AmeriCCa (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2003), 211.
60. Schechner, End of Humanism, 13–14.
61. Richard Schechner, “9/11 as Avant-Garde Art?,” 1821.
62. Montoya and Culture Clash, Anthems, 211.
CHAPTER 7
1. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 60.
2. Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 61.
3. Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Carol Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 75.
4. Rosalind Krauss, “The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodern Repetition,” October 18 (Autumn 1981): 53
5. Krauss, “The Originality of the Avant-Garde,” 53–54.
6. Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 6–7.
7. Carlson, The Haunted Stage, 16.
8. Julian Beck, “Storming the Barricades,” in The Brig, ed. Kenneth H. Brown (New York: Hill and Wang, 1965), 24.
9. Beck, “Storming the Barricades,” 24–25.
10. Beck, “Storming the Barricades,” 25
11. Alice Rayner, Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2006), x.
12. The Hill and Wang edition of Kenneth Brown’s The Brig was a shorter version of the play based specifically on the Living Theatre’s production. In the spring of 1964, the Tulane Drama Review (TDR) published the complete text of the play. See TDR 8.3 (1964): 222–57.
13. Charles Isherwood, “Keeping the Old Off Off Broadway Spirit Alive,” New York Times, April 27, 2007.
14. Richard Schechner, “Interview with Judith Malina and Kenneth Brown,” TDR 8.3 (1964): 208.
15. Charles L. Mee, Jr., “Epitaph for the Living Theatre,” TDR 8.3 (1964): 220.
16. Judith Malina, “Directing the Brig,” in The Brig, ed. Kenneth H. Brown (New York: Hill and Wang, 1965), 83.
17. Julian Beck, “How to Close a Theatre,” TDR 8, no. 3 (1964): 189.
18. Beck, “How to Close a Theatre.”
19. Beck, “How to Close a Theatre,” 190.
20. Malina, “Directing the Brig,” 84.
21. Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 126.
22. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 131.
23. Herbert Blau and Jules Irving in “The Living Theatre and Larger Issues,” TDR 8, no. 3 (1964): 195.
24. Richard Schechner, “Interview with Judith Malina and Kenneth Brown,” TDR 8, no. 3 (1964): 212.
25. Ibid.
26. C. W. E. Bigsby and Kenneth Brown, “The Violent Image: The Significance of Kenneth Brown’s The Brig,” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 8, no. 3 (1967): 429.
27. Kenneth Brown, “The Brig: A Revival with Modern Themes,” interview by Lu Olkowski, National Public Radio, April 27, 2007.
28. Cindy Rosenthal, “In Living Color: Re-viewing The Brig after Abu Ghraib,” unpublished manuscript of paper presented at the American Society for Theatre Research Conference, November 2007. Used with Permission of the author.
29. Ibid.
30. Cited in John Prados, Safe for Democracy (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006), 152.
31. Ibid., 642.
32. Stephen Grey, Ghost Plane (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2007), 16.
33. Harold Pinter, Party Time and The New World Order (New York: Grove Press, 1993), 5.
34. Living Theatre website, accessed August 16, 2008, http://www.livingtheatre.org.
35. Ibid.
36. Michael Feingold, “Prisoners of the Past,” The Village Voice, April 24, 2007.
37. Judith Malina, “The Brig: A Revival with Modern Themes,” interview by Lu Olkowski, National Public Radio, April 27, 2007.
38. Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, 80.
39. Ibid., 78.
40. Ibid., 75.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid., 79.
43. Ibid., 24.
44. Ibid.
45. Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 61.