Avant-garde theater matched minimalist art’s material reduction

Evidence

Radically impoverished and blatantly material, Foreman’s theater privileged props over sets, activities over actions, mise-en-scène over narrative, presences over performance, and sound over dialogue. The dialogue was taped. Assured that they wouldn’t have to learn any lines, Foreman’s cast, basically whomever he could find, repeated snatches of dialogue when cued by the recording. No expression was necessary. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1135

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Donald Judd box reference — cross-disciplinary formal parallelism between minimalist sculpture and experimental theater, a defining trait of the SoHo scene’s shared aesthetic. — connects to: Postwar literary avant-garde aimed at necessity freed from the individual. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2239