Between the turn of the twentieth century and the outbreak of the Second World War, avant-garde theatre artists challenged traditional norms through experimentation and radical innovation. Blurring the boundaries separating drama, theatre, and performance, these artists employed deliberate provocations and welcomed the audience’s displeasure. In subject matter, the theatrical avant-garde was equally pathbreaking, addressing a number of issues crucial to early twentieth-century modernity: war and revolution, gender roles, technology, rationality and the subconscious, futurity and the new, and the role of art in a rapidly transforming world. Futurism, Dadaism, and surrealism – three of the leading avant-garde movements – incorporated new materials and activities; brought theatre into dialogue with cabaret, variety show performance, circus, and the art of declamation; and dramatically redefined the actor’s role. Their innovations inspired contemporary experiments in non-realist staging, environmental theatre, performance art, and immersive performance.

Why is conceptualizing an American avant-garde particularly problematic? How productive is the term “avant-garde” for understanding the development of American modernism? As a concept, the “avant-garde” was defined almost entirely by theorists affiliated in various ways with the Frankfurt School using examples and with political expectations forged in western Europe. Various political and historical assumptions led to theories framing American modernist aesthetics as an impoverished variant of the European model. This chapter begins with a survey of some important theories of the avant-garde before considering the classic American modernist avant-garde – the years 1914–17 in Greenwich Village, New York City – as a case study, using poet William Carlos Williams as its touchstone. Evaluated from the perspective of European accounts, it suggests some limitations to the predominantly European framework of the avant-garde in illuminating American modernism with the example of another American poet: Hart Crane.