The Definition of Avian Garden with reference to Drama, Dance, Music and Performance. With the influence Richard Schooner had on our piece. By beneath In Twentieth Century Theatre from the time of the Renaissance on, theatre seemed to be striving for total realism, or at least for the illusion of reality. As it reached that goal in the late 19th century, a multifaceted, materialistic reaction erupted. Many movements, generally lumped together as the avian-garden, attempted to suggest alternatives to the realistic drama and production.
Paralleling modern art movements, various theoreticians turned to symbol, abstraction, and ritual in an attempt to revivalist the theatre. Although realism continues to be dominant in contemporary theatre, its earlier functions are now better served by television and film. The originator of many neutralist ideas was the German opera composer Richard Wagner. He believed that the Job of the playwright/composer was to create myths. In so doing, Wagner felt, the creator of drama was portraying an ideal world in which the audience shared a communal experience, perhaps as the ancients had done.
He sought to depict the “soul state,” or inner being, of characters rather than their practical, realistic aspects. Furthermore, Wagner was unhappy with the lack of unity among the individual arts that constituted the drama. He proposed the Counterarguments, the “total art work,” in which all dramatic elements are unified, preferably under the control of a single artistic creator. The avian-garden choreographers can be characterized by, in general having a less formal attitude towards dance than the previous generation.
While their predecessors were obsessed with conveying angst and emotion, these dancers seemed to have more fun. Their frivolity could be attributed to the fact that as angers, they were no longer on a crusade to legitimate their art. The avian-garden choreographers felt free to experiment. They questioned the frontal aspect of creating a dance that was inherent in ballet and early Modern dance; why couldn’t dance be in a round, why must the audience be directly in front?
Their explorations of ways in which theatrical space affected the dance led to some avian- garden choreographers presenting their works in small community theatres and in other unconventional locations. The avian-garden choreographers began to ponder the traditions of music, makeup ND costumes. Costumes began to take on a unisex look, as choreographers felt it music in dance and makeup in theatre. Technology was once again affecting dance, and many avian-garden choreographers embraced it. It came in the form of computer synthesized music, film and modern materials.
For example, in Mercer Cunningham piece, “Rainforest’s,” helium filled balloons made by Jasper Johns share the stage with the dancers. Mercer Cunningham was one of the first choreographers to challenge the conventions of the founding generation of modern dance. He had studied with the Graham Company for a number of years and eventually formed his own dance group in the ass’s. American Composer John Cage had a profound influence on avian-garden music and dance. He studied with the American composers Henry Cello and Adolph Weiss and the Austrian-born composer Arnold Schoenberg.
In 1942 he settled in New York City. Influenced by Zen Buddhism, Cage often used silence as a musical element, with sounds as entities hanging in time, and he sought to achieve randomness in his music. In Music of Changes (1951), for piano, tone combinations occur in a sequence determined by casting lots. In 4’33” (1952), the performers sit silently at instruments; the unconnected sounds of the environment are the music. Like Theatre Piece (1960), in which musicians, dancers, and mimes perform randomly selected tasks, 433″ dissolves the borders separating music, sound, and non-musical phenomena.
In Cage’s pieces for prepared piano, such as Mores (1943), foreign objects modify the sounds of the piano strings. Interestingly Cage wrote dance works for Mercer Cunningham. Following Cage’s lead, in the late sass and ‘ass composer Gunter Schuler, together with the pianist John Lewis and his Modern Jazz Quartet, to fuse Jazz and classical USIA into a “third stream” by bringing together musicians from both worlds in a repertoire that drew heavily on the techniques of both kinds of music.
Also active during these years was the composer, bassist, and bandleader Charlie Minus, who imbued his chord-progression-based improvisations with a wild, raw excitement. Most controversial was the work of the alto saxophonist Ornate Coleman, whose improvisations, at times almost atonal, did away with chord progressions altogether, while retaining the steady rhythmic swing so characteristic of Jazz. Although Colleen’s wailing sound and rough technique shocked many critics, there recognized the wit, sincerity, and rare sense of form that characterized his solos.
He inspired a whole school of avian-garden Jazz that flourished in the sass and ‘ass and included the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the clarinetist Jimmy Suffer, the pianist Cecil Taylor, and even Chlorate, who ventured into avian-garden improvisation before his death in 1967. From my research and these findings I had a good idea of the avian garden movement, minute performance with a group of my fellow students. We watched a video and to assist us we looked at the theory by Richard Schooner – ‘Five Avian Grades or none”,
Schooner talks about the process of life going from being out of balance to balanced, to achieve this a change must be made I. E. – not Just from A to B but the actual Journey between A and B. Schooner states that the form of Avian Garden is made up of the five following types, that in Avian Garden performance today there is elements from all five – Historical, Current, Forward looking, Tradition seeking and Intercultural.
From this I learned that actually Schooners theory was that in actual fact this was the make up of Avian Garden, that performance in the genre of avian Arden could not happen without thinking back to the early examples and adopting trends. As there currently is not a particular style so performers need to use elements from the past, create new ideas using modern technology mixed with traditional aspects, along with ideas from other cultures.
Schooner’s Five Avian Garden’s Historical avian-garden Naturalism – Realism Symbolism Futurism Cubism Expressionism Dada Surrealism Constructivism Current avian-garden Always changing Excellent quality, refined by 2nd and 3rd generations of artists Forward-looking avian-garden Heir to Historical avian-garden wows, cybernetics, hyper or virtual time/space Tradition-seeking avian-garden Grassroots’ theatre Intercultural avian-garden From the video, and using Schooners theory, we brain stormed together as a group, we liked the ideas of Historical avian garden using symbolism, expressionism and realism mixed together, as well as including multimedia and mega sound from Forward looking avian garden. We decided quite early in our devising process that we wanted to include all of the elements of performance – Drama, Dance, and Music.
The fundamental key to our performance was the theory Schooner had of life going room out of balance to balanced, we talked about the process of this happening and we basically came up with a phrase ‘ that in order for something to become balanced then a sacrifice must occur, one must give something up’ we came up with the word purification, and devised simply that to go from being out of balance to balanced purification must happen. From this we thought of birth – from the womb to life, because we decided that for a fetus to never live out side of the womb this would warrant the danger of becoming out of balance, the fact that a fetus gives up the feet of the womb for the dangers and the unknown of the world warrants a sacrifice and that birth itself is the purification leading to the balance of life.
So our theory behind our performance was that as a fetus we start life of as balanced, however if we do not make the transition from womb to world then there is obviously a danger of becoming out of balance I. E. – the fetus may die, so before that danger becomes apparent we are born, a sacrifice is made, a risk is taken a purification takes place – birth, and we remain balanced. In our performance we used the music of Massive Attack, ‘Teardrop’ which is about a totes in the womb, we chose a poem about sacrifice, change and love, and we took the form of a fetus making the Journey from womb to world. Visually our performance was simple; we combined movement and drama, with the poem being read over the music.
