Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism looks at the American avant-garde during the Cold War period, focusing on the interrelated questions of performance practices, cultural resistance, and the politics of criticism and scholarship in the U.S. counterculture. It develops three case studies: the Living Theatre's influential production of Jack Gelber's The Connection, which subverted the historical and political assumptions of the War on Drugs, utilized cutting-edge jazz both formally and thematically, and inspired a generation of artists and activists to rethink the nature of community and communication; the earliest American performance art, namely the Happenings and Fluxus events, which responded in astounding ways to the avaricious movements of Cold War capitalism; and the Black Arts Movement, which brought about practical and theoretical innovations that effectively evade the conceptual categories of Euro-American philosophy and historiography.

Mike Sell's study is groundbreaking in its consideration of the avant-garde in relationship to a crucial but rarely considered agent: the scholar and critic. The book examines the role of the scholar and critic in the cultural struggles of radical artists and activists and reveals how avant-garde performance identifies the very limits of critical consideration. The book also explores the popularization of the avant-garde: how formerly subversive art is eventually discovered by the mass media, is gobbled up by the marketplace, and eventually finds its way onto the syllabi of college and university courses. Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism is a timely and significant book that will become a standard reference for scholars in the fields of avant-garde literary criticism, theater history, critical theory, and performance studies.

"A provocative exploration of relations between the historical avant-garde and Cold War vanguard art and theatre. Sell's compelling historical and cultural narrative shows how the connections between the two exist at a very deep level of radical politics and aesthetics--an amazing concoction of rigorous scholarship, interdisciplinary learning, and progressive theorizing."
--Michael Vanden Heuvel, University of Wisconsin, Madison

"One of the most sophisticated, engaged, and engaging studies of the avant-garde in the United States that I've read-an important study that will raise the bar not only on scholarship of the Black Arts Movement, but on U.S. avant-gardism generally."
--James Smethurst, University of Massachusetts

A volume in the series Theater: Theory/Text/Performance. A list of recent titles in the series appears at the front of this volume.

Working theatrically with technology 
 
Systemic Dramaturgy offers an invigorating, practical look at the daunting cultural problems of the digital age as they relate to performance. Authors Michael Mark Chemers and Mike Sell reject the incompatibility of theatre with robots, digital media, or video games. Instead, they argue that technology is the original problem of theatre: How can we tell this story and move this audience with these tools? And if we have different tools, how can that change the stories we tell?
 
This volume attunes readers to “systemic dramaturgy”—the recursive elements of signification, innovation, and history that underlie all performance—arguing that theatre must be understood as a system of systems, a concatenation of people, places, things, politics, feelings, and interpretations, ideally working together to entertain and edify an audience. The authors discuss in-depth the application of time-tested dramaturgical skills to extra-theatrical endeavors, including multi-platform performance, installations, and videogames. And they identify the unique interventions that dramaturgs can and must make into these art forms.
 
More than any other book that has been published in the field, Systemic Dramaturgy places historical dramaturgy in conversation with technologies as old as the deus ex machina and as new as artificial intelligence. Spirited and playful in its approach, this volume collates histories, transcripts, and case studies and applies the concepts of systemic dramaturgy to works both old and avant-garde. Between chapters, Chemers and Sell talk with with some of the most forward-thinking, innovative, and creative people working in live media as they share their diverse approaches to the challenges of making performances, games, and digital media that move both heart and mind. This volume is nothing less than a guide for thinking about the future evolution of performance.
 

Theatre History Studies (THS) is a peer-reviewed journal of theatre history and scholarship published annually since 1981 by the Mid-America Theatre Conference
 
THEATRE HISTORY STUDIES, VOLUME 38
 
PART I: Studies in Theatre History
 
MATTHIEU CHAPMAN
Red, White, and Black: Shakespeare’s The Tempest and the Structuring of Racial Antagonisms in Early Modern England and the New World
 
MICHAEL CHEMERS AND MICHAEL SELL
Sokyokuchi: Toward a Theory, History, and Practice of Systemic Dramaturgy
 
JEFFREY ULLOM
The Value of Inaction: Unions, Labor Codes, and the Cleveland Play House
 
CHRYSTYNA DAIL
When for “Witches” We Read “Women”: Advocacy and Ageism in Nineteenth-Century Salem Witchcraft Plays
 
MICHAEL DENNIS
The Lost and Found Playwright: Donald Ogden Stewart and the Theatre of Socialist Commitment
 
Part II: HEMISPHERIC HISTORIOGRAPHIES
 
EMILY SAHAKIAN, CHRISTIANA MOLLDREM HARKULICH, AND LISA JACKSON-SCHEBETTA
Introduction to the Special Section
 
PATRICIA YBARRA
Gestures toward a Hemispheric Theatre History: A Work in Progress
 
ERIC MAYER- GARCÍA
Thinking East and West in Nuestra América: Retracing the Footprints of a Latinx Teatro Brigade in Revolutionary Cuba
 
ANA OLIVAREZ-LEVINSON AND ERIC MAYER-GARCÍA
Intercambio: A Visual History of Nuevo Teatro from the Ana Olivarez-Levinson Photography Collection
 
JESSICA N. PABÓN-COLÓN
Digital Diasporic Tactics for a Decolonized Future: Tweeting in the Wake of #HurricaneMaria
 
LEO CABRANES-GRANT
Performance, Cognition, and the Quest for an Affective Historiography
 
Part III: Essays from the Conference
 
The Robert A. Schanke Award-Winning Essay, from the 2019 Mid-America Theatre Conference
 
JULIE BURRELL
Reinventing Reconstruction and Scripting Civil Rights in Theodore Ward’s Our Lan’
 
The Robert A. Schanke Honorable Mention Essay, MATC 2019
 
MATTHEW MCMAHAN
 
Projections of Race at the Nouveau Cirque: The Clown Acts of Foottit and Chocolat