1. Thakara, John, ed., Design after Modernism (London, 1988).Google Scholar

2. Habermas, Jürgen, ‘Modernity – an Incomplete Project’ in Foster, Hal, ed., Postmodern Culture (London, 1985), p. 3–15Google Scholar; a new edition of The Anti-Aesthetic (Port Townsend, 1983). In a wide ranging discussion of cultural values faced by an anti- as well as a post-modernity, Habermas points in particular to an ‘aesthetic modernity’ which dates from Baudelaire, and which began to fade in the 1970s (p. 5–6). I have adopted the term avant-garde from its use in this seminal essay on postmodernism.

3. The pessimism is unmistakable in the reactions of Jean Baudrillard, and is reflected in his contributions to the collections cited in Notes 1 and 2, above. Of these, ‘The System of Objects’ (in Thakara, p. 171–82), leads forward, as an early synthesis, to the later metaphor of schizophrenia in ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’ (in Foster, p. 126–33).

4. Banes, Sally, Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance (Boston, 1980)Google Scholar. Modern American dance was fixed in the text by Humphrey, Doris, The Art of Making Dances, ed. Pollack, Barbara (London, 1959)Google Scholar, though the basic modernist philosophy is established in Laban's, RudolfModern Educational Dance (London, 1948).Google Scholar

5. The observations on Cunningham include a classic summary (Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers, p. 5–7), and a precise location for his work in relation to the post-modern (p. 10–11).

6. Bond, Edward, Two Post-Modern Plays (London, 1990)Google Scholar, which includes his ‘Notes on Post-modernism’ (p. 211–44), of which the climactic Note 79 (p. 243–4) suggests a divided mind. The opportunity has obviously – and contrastingly – been welcomed by Howard Barker who, in the context of the British theatre, might be seen (and has been) as ‘post-modern’ in contrast to Bond's substantial modernism, if an exact scheme of succession is what is required.

7. The problem is posed, effectively, in the study by Wright, Elizabeth, Postmodern Brecht: a Re-Presentation (London, 1988), with her discussion in Chapter 6 (p. 113–37)Google Scholar of ‘The Brechtian Postmodern’ in the light of work by Bausch, Müller, and Wilson. Perhaps the most provocative vision of Brecht as modernist is that by Barthes, Roland: the short essay ‘Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein’, translated by Heath, Stephen in Image, Music, Text (Glasgow, 1977), p. 69–78Google Scholar. A revisionist project for Brecht, to detach his ‘value’ from the totalitarian values of Marxism, seems inevitable in the light of the events in eastern Europe, and the effect of such a project on attempted definitions of modernism is bound to be problematic in the extreme.

8. Brook, Peter, The Empty Space, (Harmondsworth, 1968)Google Scholar; and Schechner, Richard, notably The End of Humanism (New York, 1982)Google Scholar, which includes Schechner's own act of self-distancing in the essay ‘The Decline and Fall of the (American) Avant-Garde’.

9. I hope to follow this short intervention-cum-discussion document with a more detailed analysis of the rhetorics of Brook and Schechner.

10. Brook is presumably referring to Marlowe and Jonson, alongside other nonentities of the period: the quotation comes from The Empty Space, p. 40–1.

11. For the work of Wilson and Schumann, see the expansive volumes by Brecht, Stefan, The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson (London, 1982)Google Scholar, and The Bread and Puppet Theatre, two vols. (London, 1988). Schechner is the editor of The Drama Review, and the author of many essays on the anthropology of performance theory, of which he has recently re-edited an influential collection: Performance Theory 2 (New York and London, 1988). The Performance Group's Dionysus in '69 (edited by Schechner) was published by Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, (New York, 1970)Google Scholar. Brook's The Empty Space can now be read alongside his The Shifting Point: Forty Years of Theatrical Exploration (London, 1989). The sacred trinity used by Brook in The Empty Space as an illustration of Holy Theatre was composed of Cunningham, Beckett, and Grotowski: the last – inevitably – linked to Shakespeare (p. 69), as well as to Artaud (p. 67).

12. Said, Edward, Orientalism (London, 1978)Google Scholar. It is intriguing to wonder what Said would have to say of the industry now developing around Brook's Mahabharata. Some intimations of the possible crisis were expressed by Zarrilli, Philip, ‘The Aftermath: When Peter Brook Came to India’, The Drama Review, XXX, No. 1 (1986), p. 92–100CrossRefGoogle Scholar. More recently, Roland Joffe has run into anger and opposition in Calcutta with his location work for the projected film of City of Joy. Brown, Derek, in ‘No Joy for Joffe's Film in a Thin-Skinned City’, The Guardian, London, 9 03 1991, p. 10Google Scholar, cited an embittered comment from the Bengali newspaper Aajkaal, describing Joffe as ‘a man of principle… his principle is that only white men are the bearers of truth’.

13. Foreman, Richard, Plays and Manifestos (New York, 1976)Google Scholar, with the more recent Reverberation Machines: the Later Plays and Essays (New York, 1985).

14. The marked fidelity to the text in this production correlated to this crucial transgression of the theatric act envisaged by Genet: so we have here practitioner-as-corrector. Stein actually reversed the intended theatric process by having his actors visit Africa, and appropriate some elements of theatricality. For a summary, see Bradby, David and Williams, David, Directors' Theatre (London, 1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15. The Greek roots of the word ‘idiocy’ pointed to a disjunction between the self-absorbed individual (the idiotes) and the public sphere: an avoidance of integration, of identification with the group.

16. Attention must flow, at least theoretically, to that muted (at times almost cancelled) component of a now de-subsidized theatre: see Blau, Herbert, The Audience (Baltimore, 1990)Google Scholar, and Bennett, Susan, Theatre Audiences: a Theory of Production and Reception, (London, 1990).Google Scholar