ABSTRACT
The twentieth century saw a huge range of experiments with theatrical form but, scenographically speaking avant-garde practice in the West was consistently notable for "its embrace of performance space, and rejection of setting". Often dispensing with scenic apparatus altogether, or else integrating it almost seamlessly with the architectural aspects of a performance venue, experimental practitioners sought to articulate and explore space itself as a primary concern of the theatrical event. More specifically, the post-war American avant-garde – on which this chapter focuses – can be read as oscillating productively between treatments of space as environment, on the one hand, and as landscape, on the other. By the 1970s, with a pendulum swing away from environmental communalism, avant-garde theatre had become preoccupied with the more formalist, Steinian, landscape staging approach. Deliberately abandoning the legacy of "environmental theatre", the Wooster Group took the architectural structures characteristic of Richard Schechner's staging and turned them into landscaping elements that overtly emphasized the proscenium divide.
