Vanguard Performance Beyond Left and Right

Challenges assumptions regarding “radical” and “experimental” performance that have long dominated thinking about the avant-garde. The essays bring to light vanguard performances rarely discussed: those that support totalitarian regimes, promote conservative values, or have been effectively snapped up by right-wing regimes they sought to oppose.

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Vanguard Performance Beyond Left and Right challenges assumptions regarding “radical” and “experimental” performance that have long dominated thinking about the avant-garde. The essays bring to light vanguard performances rarely discussed: those that support totalitarian regimes, promote conservative values, or have been effectively snapped up by right-wing regimes they sought to oppose.

The volume explores a central paradox, examining how innovative performances that challenge oppressive power structures can also be deployed in deliberate, passionate support of oppressive power. Essays by top international scholars pose engaging new questions about the historical avant-garde, vanguard acts, and the complex role of artistic innovation and live performance in global politics.

Focusing on performances that work against progressive and democratic ideas, the book demonstrates how many compelling performance ideals—unification, exaltation, immersion—are, in themselves, neither moral nor immoral; they are only emotional and aesthetic urges that can be powerfully channelled into a variety of social and political outlets.