| This critical cultural history examines early 21st century placemaking by avant-garde performance practices in three arts-rich U.S. cities, New York, Chicago, and Seattle. In each city, it considers the trend of avant-garde practices---such as performance art, contemporary dance, and experimental theater---taking place in geographic margins conceptualized as frontiers. In the 19th century, frontiers were Native American lands stolen by Euro-American settlers. In the early 21st century, frontiers were positioned similarly, as low-income, largely non-white, and urban peripheral neighborhoods, areas where avant-garde performance practices often clustered and laid the groundwork for neoliberal gentrification that prompted displacement of long-time residents. The avant-garde frontier, this study conceptualizes, involves the clustering of "edgy" aesthetic practices in fringe areas referred to as physical and imaginative edges, spaces especially produced by the Great Recession and by post-collapse austerity, which marked geographies with emptiness and displacement. As a concept "avant-garde frontier" aligns the trend of avant-garde practices in geographic margins called frontiers; it also suggests more complicated relationships among aesthetics, race, political economies, and space.;The dissertation documents how in New York City, avant-garde practices clustered in Williamsburg and Bushwick, two adjacent North Brooklyn neighborhoods often called frontiers in press and conversation. Venues were often buildings converted from former commercial uses such as Collapsable Hole, The Brick, and The Bushwick Starr. This study chronicles performance in Chicago, where Pilsen, a predominately Mexican-American neighborhood, was referred to as a frontier in press, and became home to the Chicago Fringe Festival and Southside Ignoramus Quartet. The dissertation captures how in Seattle frontier resonated with the city's history as a frontier-town, early 21st century isolated geography and arts density, and practices by groups including Annex Theatre, Implied Violence, and the Satori Group.;This dissertation demonstrates that avant-garde practices sought frontier geographies to support their intimate aesthetics and low-cost economies. Clustering within peripheral space, avant-garde practices sparked neoliberal and austere policy and development that displaced non-white and low-income residents, including artists. But also within peripheral space, avant-garde practices made space for aesthetics that emphasized intimacy and presence, and low-cost economies. This dissertation contends that avant-garde performance practices demanded not just aesthetic poverty (intimacy) and economic poverty (low-cost operations), but also geographic poverty by taking place in low-cost, often non-white neighborhoods, areas often developed by neoliberal policies. Crucially, the dissertation asserts that the avant-garde is both an aesthetic practice and a geographic practice that makes aesthetic meanings that influence practices within geographic space. |
