FUTURISM AND
EXPERIMENTAL PERFORMANCE
http://www.worldhistory.com/wiki/F/Futurism-(art).htm
Futurism was a 20th century art movement. Although a nascent Futurism
can been seen surfacing throughout the very early years of that century, the 1907 essay Entwurf einer neuen
Astetik der Tonkunst (Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music) by the Italian composer Ferruccio Busoni is sometimes claimed as its true
jumping-off point. Futurism was a largely Italian movement, although it also
had adherents in other countries, most notably Russia.
The Futurists explored every
medium of art, including painting, sculpture, poetry, theatre, music and even gastronomy. The Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was the first among them to
produce a manifesto of their artistic philosophy in his Manifesto of Futurism (1909), first released in Milan and published in the French paper Le Figaro (February 20). Marinetti summed up the major
principles of the Futurists, including a passionate loathing of ideas from the
past, especially political and artistic traditions. He and others also espoused
a love of speed, technology and violence. The car, the plane, the industrial
town were all legendary for the Futurists, because they represented the
technological triumph of man over nature.
Marinetti's impassioned polemic
immediately attracted the support of the young Milanese painters - Boccioni, Carrà, and
Russolo - who wanted to extend Marinetti's ideas to the visual arts (Russolo was also a composer, and
introduced Futurist ideas into his compositions). The painters Balla and
Severini met Marinetti in 1910 and together these artists represented
Futurism's first phase.
The painter and sculptor Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916) wrote the Manifesto of Futurist
Painters in 1910 in which he vowed:
We
will fight with all our might the fanatical, senseless and snobbish religion of
the past, a religion encouraged by the vicious existence of museums. We rebel
against that spineless worshipping of old canvases, old statues and old
bric-a-brac, against everything which is filthy and worm-ridden and corroded by
time. We consider the habitual contempt for everything which is young, new and
burning with life to be unjust and even criminal.
Futurists dubbed the love of the
past "pastism", and its proponents "pastists" (cf. Stuckism). They would sometimes even
physically attack alleged pastists, in other words, those who were apparently
not enjoying Futurist exhibitions or performances.
The Futurists' glorification of
modern warfare as the ultimate artistic
expression and their intense nationalism allowed those of them who survived World War I to embrace Italian fascism.
Futurism influenced many other
20th century art movements, including Art Deco, Vorticism, Constructivism and Surrealism. Although Futurism itself is now
regarded as extinct, having died out during the 1920s, powerful echoes of Marinetti's
thought, especially his "dreamt-of metallization of the human body",
still remain in Japanese culture and surface in manga/anime and the film works of Shinya Tsukamoto.
http://www.worldhistory.com/wiki/E/Experimental-music.htm
Experimental music is any music that challenges the commonly
accepted notions of what music is. There is an overlap with avant-garde music. John Cage was a pioneer in experimental
music and defined and gave credibility to the form.
http://www.worldhistory.com/wiki/E/Experimental-theatre.htm
Experimental theatre is a general term for various
movements in Western theatre that began in the 20th century as a reaction against the
then-dominant conventions governing the writing and production of drama, and
against naturalism in particular. The term has
shifted over time as the mainstream theatre world has adopted many forms that
were once considered radical. It is used more or less interchangeably with the
term avant-garde theatre.