Collaboration, democracy and the total artwork

This chapter examines 20th-century collaborative practices and discourses in the performing arts – primarily dance – through the lens of composer Richard Wagner’s notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk. The total artwork, expounded in Wagner’s mid-19th-century landmark writings on art’s role in society, was seen as the artistic enactment of a democratic political organisation, with Wagner drawing correlations between artistic and political reform. The chapter shows how Wagner’s objectives can be usefully applied to, and take form in, postmodern dance, tracing a critical genealogy through Bertolt Brecht and the Cunningham-Cage collaboration to the postmodern work of Yvonne Rainer and Pina Bausch, before concluding with an outlook on today’s radical collaborations. Throughout the chapter, different collaborative practices are related to distinct conceptions of democracy.

© 2016