Avant-Garde Theatre Quotes

The great countercultural movement that we all know from the mid-1960s was epitomised by popular music. But within a few years another shift happened: the birth of alternative theatre.

I have always felt that the rise of what became known as alternative comedy was born out of the loins of the alternative theatre movement.

At the end of the 1960s, I was part of the downtown theatrical movement in New York that was making work in alleyways, garages, gyms, churches, non-traditional spaces. The idea was to get away from the illusion of the conventional theatre. But then I thought, what's wrong with illusion?

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?

So somehow we've got to get back to making stuff for people that are not necessarily interested in seeing the common Broadway fare.

There are lots of young vital playwrights who are experimenting, and these are the plays that people who are interested in the theatre should see. They should go off Broadway. They should go to the cafe theatres and see the experiments that are being made.

Seeing the work of directors like Romeo Castellucci, Ivo van Hove, Thomas Ostermeier, and Simon McBurney and Theatre de Complicite, was, and continues to be, hugely important to me. To my mind, these are artists who are forging new languages of performance and storytelling, and their constant reinvention is very inspiring.

On the one hand, young theatre directors were coming to television theatre, because they wanted to get closer to the cinema, despite having studied and worked for the theatre.

When theater becomes a soothing middle-class thing, when it's packaged as the Night Out, then that's the death of it.

I am interested in independent cinema and theatre, and they don't make news.

I suppose I'm really interested in theatre that provides an intensity of experience on another level.