Post 6: Avant-Garde 180s (featuring GATZ)

Greetings, all--

This post covers not last week (Mardi Gras/Keyword) but the week before last (the avant-garde stuff). So much avant-garde performance sounds utterly stupid, almost a parody, when taken out of context. A woman just sits all day at a table staring at whoever sits down across from her? Get a job, loser! Or: A whole movement based on blurred images? Huh. Half the pics I take are Futurist, and I never even new it!

One of my favorite moments in undergrad classes are when I get to witness students doing a complete 180 in their opinion of a work. They hear about some experimental or avant-garde performance, mock it, and then hear (usually from me) a deep retelling/reframing/explanation of that performance. Then they're silent.

One of those moments happened yesterday in my capstone class. Students were writing about what kind of company they'd like to work for in 10 or so years. One student named Elevator Repair Service. He talked about their current big show, GATZ. GATZ, as you may have heard, consists of a live reading of The Great Gatsby. The whole thing. It is eight hours long.



The class groaned.
GATZ at The Public Theater TRAILER from ERS Theater on Vimeo.

Dr. Fletcher swoops in! Funnily enough, my friend in Scranton (the same friend who invited me up to talk last week) had just seen GATZ. He described it briefly. I groaned. Then he told what it was like to watch it. I'll rely on his retelling here:

The show starts with a guy in an office cubicle, trying to load something onto a PC. We see a projection of his screen. It crashes. He grumbles, sighs, tries again. Bluescreen of death. At this point, my friend said, it's like ten minutes into the show. You wonder if the whole eight hours will be like this. Frustrated, the man rummages around his office clutter and pulls out a book: The Great Gatsby. He starts reading.

As he goes on, office life continues behind him, people coming and going, making copies, chatting. Then, at certain points, characters in the office begin saying lines from the book as the reader comes to them. They seem accidental, natural coincidences at first. Then they become more frequent. Gradually, the life in the office seems to take on features of the novel--or vice versa. It's riveting, moving, dreamlike, exciting. Finally, forty-five pages from the end, the man puts down the novel, looks directly at the audience, and recites the entire final section from memory (apparently the actor used to do this as a party trick).

By the time I finish telling this to my capstone class, they're silent, absorbed. "So often," I tell them, "we go to a two-and-a-half-hour show that feels like it's four hours long. Imagine going to an eight-hour-show that feels like just an hour or two."

They seemed sold on that.

For this post, share a story of some kind of experimental or avant-garde performance you've seen or heard of that went (for you or for others) from That's so dumb to OMG what a great thing.

Post by Tuesday (March 3)-ish. Comment on this post about someone else's post by Friday (March 6).