American Performance in 1976 : The Evolution of an Avant-Garde

A panoramic account of a single year uncommonly crowded with seminal works of performance. Surveying American drama, theater, dance, and performance art across the 1970s, this study then delves into five representative works of avant-garde theater from 1976 to reveal the poetics of a transformative moment in American culture.

1976 was a febrile, transitional year in cultural history, coming after Watergate and Vietnam and before the AIDS epidemic and the rise of the Conservative movement. Bicentennial triumphalism sounded dissonant against a violent past and uncertain future. Marc Robinson here explores how innovative artists across disciplines – drama, dance, music, film, visual art – responded to this period, before zeroing in on avant-garde theater. Over 1976, five landmark productions could be seen within months of one another: Cecil Taylor's A Rat's Mass / Procession in Shout, Meredith Monk's Quarry, the Robert Wilson / Philip Glass opera Einstein on the Beach, Joseph Chaikin's production of Adrienne Kennedy's A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, and, finally, the Wooster Group's first open rehearsal of Spalding Gray and Elizabeth LeCompte's Rumstick Road. In close readings of these five works, Robinson reveals the poetics of a transformative moment in American culture.