Avant-garde productions can fail when they lose their original infrastructural and class conditions.

Evidence

The New York Times called Grotowski’s Laboratory Theater, subject of several lengthy Village Voice articles over the past year and the avant-performative event of the season, “the most overground of underground phenomena.” Slave Ship might have been described as the most underground of overground productions. Its revival was foredoomed. The church facilities were inadequate and the cast, which had hoped to perform in Harlem, stopped the show more than once to complain that without backstage hot water and only two small dressing rooms for fourteen actors, conditions resembled those of an actual slave ship. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1507

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s core thesis about material conditions enabling invention — here the inverse case, a show failing once those conditions are stripped. — connects to: Avant-garde death followed the loss of the anticipated revolution — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 253; avant-garde shock loses its subversive force once it becomes expected and institutionalized — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 564
• SEED: The ‘underground of overground / overground of underground’ inversion could anchor an essay on how prestige and material support corrupt or break avant-garde work.