What is 'avant-garde' theater?

What is 'avant-garde' theater?

Avant-garde theater has become known as a catch-all term these days for anything that's known as experimental. If you think of actually the movement of avant-garde theatre, it started in the 20th century; it's a western tradition. It really started as a result of playwrights and artists who wanted to throw away conventions of theatre up to that point. I mentioned earlier the neo-classical norms of theatre that were created by the Greeks. It was sort of a movement away from that. It was doing away with time and space, incorporating surrealistic elements. There have been a lot of dramaters and historians, theatre historians, who have sort of postulated that the avant-garde movement, really, if you look at playwrights such as Antonin Artaud and his "theatre of cruelty" for instance. It really is sort of a move toward more primitive theatre; toward visceral, emotional theatre. But in this day and age it's also sort of progressed to encompass performance art, for instance; one-person shows, Karen Finley, for instance, anything that sort of perverts the mainstream and the social conventions of the time.