Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism: Approaching the Living Theatre, Happenings/Fluxus, and the Black Arts Movement (review)

2008 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 412-414
Author(s):  
Kimberly. Jannarone
Keyword(s):  
Black Arts Movement ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Living Theatre

The Challenge of the Changing Same: The Jazz Avant-Garde of the 1960s, the Black Aesthetic and the Black Arts Movement

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Robinson
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Black Arts Movement ◽  
Black Music ◽  
Artistic Identity ◽  
Black Aesthetic ◽  
Black Literature ◽  
Black Artists ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
The 1960S

This essay focuses on the relationship between writers associated with the Black Arts Movement in the United States and the experimental directions in jazz that occurred during the 1960s, the decade generally associated with the evolution of the Black Arts Movement as well as the rise of the jazz avant-garde. The emergent experimentalism in the music centered on transgressive and innovative uses of improvisation that led to new approaches, sounds and interpretive meanings. While it is necessary to understand that both poetry and music of the 1960s were important sites where hegemonic processes were contested, it is equally important to draw out differences in the strategies of various black artists. Throughout this period, the attitudes, values, and goals of black artists were anything but monolithic. Instead, the interrelated worlds of black literature and musical experimentalism created a dialogic space that encouraged interrogation, innovation and articulation of new artistic ideas. Within this environment, “black music” took on heterotopic meanings; rather than a rigid, collectivized notion of “black identity” in music, the Black Arts Movement and the jazz avant-garde were marked by multiple, sometimes competing, conceptions of artistic identity. In most cases, the musicians stridently resisted any single narrative of racial and socio-aesthetic identity. The essay clarifies the complex critical positions of those involved with the Black Arts Movement and the jazz avant-garde, while challenging the possibility of any one unifying narrative about this improvised, processual music.

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