Avant Garde Theatre Quotes & Sayings

It's my privilege to be able to play somebody not myself. I'm an actor who creates characters based in voice, movement, emotional quality, speech. — Constance Wu

I am, it seems, an avant-garde dramatist. It would even seem obvious since I am present here at discussions on the avant-garde theatre. It is all entirely official. But what does the term avant-garde mean? — Eugene Ionesco

Music is the 'pure' art par excellence. It says nothing and has nothing to say. Never really having an expressive function, it is opposed to drama, which even in its most refined forms still bears a social message and can only be 'put over' on the basis of an immediate and profound affinity with the values and expectations of its audience. The theatre divides its public and divides itself. The Parisian opposition between right-bank and left-bank theatr, bourgeois theatre and avant-garde theatre, is inextricably aesthetic and political. — Pierre Bourdieu

Avant-garde theatre, with its distrust of the individual (that bourgeois invention), tends to go beyond [character] and the psychological approach in search of a syntax of types and characters which are deconstructed and post-individual. — Patrice Pavis

If you help me find my sister, you can have these back. I saved them for you."
"Thanks," he croaks, surveying the wings. "They'll look great on my wall. — Susan Ee

I love film - it's like painting. — Azzedine Alaia

I don't have many regrets. I regret mistakes, particularly those that damage other people, and we've all made some of those. But I'm not sad about change. — John Gutfreund

In avant garde drama ... primitivism goes hand in hand with aesthetic experimentation designed to advance the technical progress of the art itself by exploring fundamental questions: What is a theatre? What is a play? What is an actor? What is a spectator? What is the relation between them all? What conditions serve this best? — C. D. Innes

History makes one wise, but not competent to solve concrete problems. — Ludwig Von Mises

More than one branch of the avant-garde, claiming to break with the bourgeois vision and mode of production, remains tied to it in spite of its denials and ex-communications. We are far from having overcome bourgeois thought or practices, despite the socialist "intermission" between the Russian revolution and the collapse of the Berlin wall. The avant-garde has lost its radical nature. On the other hand, "bourgeois theatre" is sometimes subtle enough to flirt with the avant-garde or to make "intelligent boulevard theatre. — Patrice Pavis

AESTHETICS OF AVANT-GARDE THEATRE
Make the stage an actor
Make an actor the stage. — Kenneth Koch

See what I mean? Your confidence is so strong it's obnoxious. — Stacy Kramer