From avant-garde theatre to "shock-rock" performances.

He whips out the hits with a cane in hand, mocking death and destruction with a pouty sneer and a devil-made-me-do-it gaze. Rock theatre at its best, equally parts vaudeville and amusement park gore.

Reminiscent of a cheap B-grade horror flick, Alice Cooper's performances have become short on substance, but long on props with enough fog, trap doors, and ramps to keep even the most jaded creature-freak amused. The stage looks like the encrusted and battered remnants of a long-forgotten gravesite with skeletons strewn about.

His performance has been toned down over the years; he no longer beheads himself on-stage or anything too elaborate like presenting his famous boa. The most complex stunt he pulls is escaping from a straight jacket while an abused nurse (played by his real life daughter) dances around. Alice Cooper gets into his performance, and is still doing what he's been doing better than anyone else over the past 30 years: turning a rock concert into a campy theatrical extravaganza.

"Well, we were all in high school and we got together, and in college -- we were in Art College together. We started combining the use of light and the use of theatrics and the use of as many art forms as possible, and it's still growing -- that's the whole idea of it. Right now it's here and certain people are affected by it, but six months from now, it'll grow -- more thins will be added. Things are taken out, it becomes more polished, so it's an ever-growing, ever-changing thing, the whole act is, and it's not really a play, or an opera like "Tommy" or anything like that, but it's a theatrical piece that I really don't like to put a title on, because you really can't..."  (In an interview with Mike Quigley)

A theatrical piece? What is this, a new awakening of avant-garde theatre or the use of the term "theatre" for …I hesitate - performance art, rock performance?

"We brought theatrics to rock 'n' roll. We did it before Bowie, we did it before Kiss and before anybody" (In an interview with The Tribune).

Theatrics it is!

Throughout most of theatre history, theory almost always followed the practise, a means of codifying and explaining what already existed. The avant-garde, however, reversed the age-old process of emerging organically from a variety of cultural forces.

Intellectual idea preceded practise and the theatre was built upon a theoretical foundation.

For the post-war avant-garde American theatre, the wellspring was Marcel Duchamp (with Gertrude Stein and John Cage its pillars).

Beginning with his cubist inspired work in 1911, Duchamp quickly moved into new realms and created art that did not depend upon traditional framing and separation for its validity, but virtually demanded that the viewers see through the work to the surrounding world.

With Duchamp and later John Cage, art no longer depended upon its difference or otherness: its essence derived from its connection and continuity with the experimental world. Thus the avant-garde could be defined in part as that which reorganized the perception of reality and is inextricably tied to the scientific revolution of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The technical revolution that reshaped modern thinking served to reinforce post-Renaissance perceptual patterns, creating thereby a continuing tension with anti-narrative structures. It was Marcel Duchamp who crystallized the inherent tensions and contradictions into a guiding aesthetic. Being probably the first artist of the twentieth century to fully grasp the implications of the shifting sense of reality and to understand that, accordingly, the reasons and methods for creating art had to change as well. His attempt was to rethink that the world rests on two supports, the "machine", the image and incarnation of the epoch and "chance" which for his contemporaries had de facto replaced divinity. One result of Duchamp's rethinking was the "ready-made". By taking every day objects and transforming them by means of metaphorical framing devices into works of art, he challenged notions of art and creation while simultaneously calling into question the difference between art and life, and he was probably the only one who fully understood that the very foundations of art had been altered.

While at Art collage, Alice had indeed studied the life and work of Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp had also dabbled with changing ones sexual identity, an idea exploited by Andy Warhol, (and later rock stars like Bowie, Boy George and Marilyn Manson). Alice knew that by using the same tactics, he could create the same effect on the world as Duchamp had on the Parisian Art establishment. And behind Cooper's intellectual reasoning (he declares to hate intellectuals) his statement:

"I've always been a surrealist before. Everything we deal with is total confusion. I love confusion. I love the blur of the whole thing. I love the absurdity of it."

At the Knoedler Gallery in New York, Salvador Dali, Cooper's idol who had offered Geopoliticus Child as the cover of 'Love It To Death' in a flowing white robe, introduced Alice in black leather and pearls to the assembled art critics and newsmen. Dali rambled on about 'le brain of Alice Cooper' and insisted on kissing Alice on the forehead. "To me Cooper is the exponent of confusion", he said.

To be honest, I wanted to get an interview with "the exponent of confusion" about the background of his theatrics, but was unfortunately turned down several times.

From art and theatrics back to theatre! It would take too long to go through all the stages of the American avant-garde theatre, however at some point, John Cage has triumphed:

In a sense, theatre, music and dance have become intertwined and, in some cases, indistinguishable, and not only are few distinctions made between high and low art, but there are few barriers between what elements or components may or may not be used in artistic creations. There is no establishment versus anti-establishment – only a monolithic cultural scene with internal variations.

It was actually Laurie Anderson who finally crossed over from the rarefied world of avant-garde performance into the popular mainstreams. Her performances took on the quality and structure of rock concerts   and played in venues devoted to mid-size rock concerts, such as New York's Beacon Theatre. They also employed rock-show technology, including two twenty-foot projection towers and three movable rear-projection screens, forty-five computer-controlled films and slide projectors in the towers and others in the auditorium (for the 1989 "Empty Places" performance), and it was Alice Cooper who expanded and twisted the means of performance art into rock-performance.

One might argue that performance art in connection with rock performances cannot be regarded as such, and that there is no connection to performance art (or theatre) in its closer sense. Maybe! However the public confronted with these rock performances are young people who might be (or rather not?) be the theatre audience of tomorrow. And sad but true, disposable culture has subsumed the arts (and that does include theatre) as well as consumer products.

"A primary function of art and thought", as critic Lionel Trilling pointed out, "is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgement".

The solution to restore perception and judgement? 

"Za rabotu", as the Russians say, "to work!"

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