ABSTRACT
The performance practices documented so far in this section are all concerned with making connections between art and life. The provocative anarchism of Dadaism challenged the pretensions of art, Happenings provided a focus for redefining the role of the ‘non-artists’ in performance, and the counter-cultural performance of the neoavant-garde sought to inspire personal liberation through shared acts of creativity. Taken together, they present compelling reconceptualisations of the role of art in society. Kaprow comments that avant-garde movements ‘all focussed in one way or another on the primacy of the irrational and/or the unconscious . . . . the idea of art as an act rather than an aesthetics was implicit by 1909 and explicit by 1946’ (Sandford 1995: 219). Interwoven with the avant-gardists’ interest in the healing powers of the unconscious there was, however, more overtly political and materialist theatre in which radical performance was used as a tool of social mobilisation and as a medium of communication.
