Word: avant
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Color Purple, Witness, Silverado), made his Chicago stage debut at Steppenwolf's intimate--and perforce uncommercial--211- seat space in Athol Fugard's A Lesson from Aloes. A few blocks away, William Peterson, star of the film thriller To Live and Die in L.A., has rejoined the funky, avant-garde Remains Theater in a portrayal of brainwashing, Days and Nights Within...
Arena Stage has long been receptive to avant-garde European writers and directors. In rescuing Restoration from relative obscurity (the only previous U.S. production, in 1985, played five performances at the 99-seat Illusion Theater in Minneapolis), the company has proved especially shrewd. The show displays both the adaptability of Arena's theater-in-the-round space-- actors rise through the floor and almost to the ceiling, musicians are suspended in a metal-mesh box above the stage--and the strength of its newly expanded ensemble. Stanley Anderson is by turns uproarious, winsome and infuriating as the despicable Lord...
...absorption of Wilson and Glass into the cultural mainstream is not surprising. In the evolution of art, the substantial contributions of the avant-garde become part of the culture. In addition to The Juniper Tree, the current ART season also features Wilson's adaptation of Euripides' Alcestis, with music by Performance Artist Laurie Anderson. And the recently concluded Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music had as a highlight Wilson's theater piece The Golden Windows, an elusive love story with a Beckett-like nonsense text and some startling stage pictures, including an earthquake that sunders the stage...
...contrast, the American avant-garde appears largely to have conquered the angst that it felt during the '60s. It has lost much of its rebelliousness, but in so doing has discovered a more delicate mode of expression as well as a broader popular base. To refine and succeed is not necessarily to become complacent or sell out. The crucial thing for any style is to avoid both self- satisfaction and self-parody, to keep the visions fresh. If The Juniper Tree is any indication, the American avant-garde is alive and well, just a little older and wiser...
...real events have a way of belying scenarios, and in the past few years the most striking and heavily publicized trend in German art has been back to the very kind of painting that obsessed the German avant-garde before 1914: fervent, ejaculatory, based on the human figure and full of pretensions toward expressive plangency and "primitive" directness. There has been a like revival of the kind of acrid satire and political chronicling that occupied the German Dadaists and Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) painters in the '20s. The image stream of German expressionism went underground, but not even Nazism could...