`It is a pleasure to read. Well-written, free of cant, impressively wide-ranging. The book is really an introduction to the avant-garde.' - John Lahr

`It is a pleasure to read. Well-written, free of cant, impressively wide-ranging. The book is really an introduction to the avant-garde.' - John Lahr

A stunning visual chronicle of New York's iconic performance venue

This book focuses on the role of La MaMa Experimental Theatre within Avant-garde theater during the 1960s and 1970s. This study investigates the involvement of the Off-Off Broadway circuit in the Avant-garde experimentations both in the United States (New York specifically) and in Europe. This exploration shows the two-way influence – between Europe and the United States – testified by documents gathered in years of archival research. In this relevant artistic exchange, La MaMa (and Ellen Stewart as its founder and artistic director) emerges as a key element. La MaMa’s companies brought to Europe the American culture and the New York underground culture, while their members learnt European training techniques by attending workshops or taking part in the research of Eugenio Barba, Jerzy Grotowski, and Peter Brook, and brought their principles back to the United States. This book goes through a chronological path that presents some key cases of collaboration between the above-mentioned European masters and some La MaMa’s artists and companies: Tom O ’Horgan and La MaMa Repertory Troupe, the Open Theatre, Andrei Serban and The Great Jones Repertory Company, La MaMa Plexus. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in theater and performance studies.

This book examines experimental Irish theatre that ran counter to the naturalistic 'peasant' drama synonymous with Irish playwriting. Focusing on four marginalised playwrights after Yeats, it charts a tradition linking the experimentation of the early Irish theatre movement with the innovation of contemporary Irish and international drama.

Pronouncements such as “the avant-garde is dead,” argues James M. Harding, have suggested a unified history or theory of the avant-garde. His book examines the diversity and plurality of avant-garde gestures and expressions to suggest “avant-garde pluralities” and how an appreciation of these pluralities enables a more dynamic and increasingly global understanding of vanguardism in the performing arts. In pursuing this goal, the book not only surveys a wide variety of canonical and noncanonical examples of avant-garde performance, but also develops a range of theoretical paradigms that defend the haunting cultural and political significance of avant-garde expressions beyond what critics have presumed to be the death of the avant-garde. The Ghosts of the Avant-Garde(s) offers a strikingly new perspective not only on key controversies and debates within avant-garde studies but also on contemporary forms of avant-garde expression within a global political economy.

Pop Goes the Avant-Garde: Experimental Theatre in Contemporary China is the first comprehensive review of the history and development of avant-garde drama and theater in the People's Republic of China since 1976. Drawing on a range of critical perspectives in the fields of comparative literature, theater, performance, and culture studies, the book explores key artistic movements and phenomena that have emerged in China's major cultural centers in the last several decades. It surveys the work of China's most influential dramatists, directors and performance groups, with a special focus on Beijing-based playwright, director and filmmaker Meng Jinghui--the former enfant terrible of Beijing theater, who is now one of Asia's foremost theater personalities. Through an extensive critique of theories of modernism and the avant-garde, the author reassesses the meanings, functions and socio-historical significance of this work in non-Western contexts by proposing a new theoretical construct--the pop avant-garde--and exploring new ways to understand and conceptualize aesthetic practices beyond Euro-American cultures and critical discourses.

This book examines experimental Irish theatre that ran counter to the naturalistic 'peasant' drama synonymous with Irish playwriting. Focusing on four marginalised playwrights after Yeats, it charts a tradition linking the experimentation of the early Irish theatre movement with the innovation of contemporary Irish and international drama.

This fourth volume in the series Theatre in Europe charts the development of theatrical presentation at a time of great cultural and political upheaval.