SOURCE: Harding, James M. “Dissent Behind the Barricades: Radical Art, Revolutionary Stages, and Avant-Garde Divisions.” In Contours of the Theatrical Avant-Garde, Performance and Textuality, pp. 176–201. Ann Arbor: Univeristy of Michigan Press, 2000.

In the following essay, Harding combines a report of the occupation/liberation of the Odeon Theatre in Paris in 1968 with a discussion of the integration of vanguard politics and art as expressed in the opposing positions advanced by Beck and Jean-Louis Barrault.

Avant-garde Divisions: Disunity in the Reconciliation of Radical Art and Radical Politics

In the fall of 1968, just as the journal TDR was sending to press a seminal essay on European experimental theater, its author, Jean-Jacques Lebel, asked that a postscript be added. As if questioning the entirety of the essay, the postscript to “On the Necessity of Violation” began, “Something has changed.” The immediate something to which Lebel referred was the boundary that had been...