The Welsh National Theatre: The Avant-Garde in the Diaspora

Abstract

In September 1991 a booklet, Export Wales, was produced by Janec Alexander, theatre coordinator of Cardiff’s Chapter Arts Centre. Its purpose was promotional and it was given wide distribution overseas. It marked an interesting reversal in the Welsh situation by ostensively defining a Welsh National Theatre made up of experimental groups. One cluster of groups, deriving from the Cardiff Laboratory Theatre (now The Centre for Performance Research), developed under the influence of Eastern European theatre practice, particularly the work of Grotowski and Barba’s Odin Teatret. The influences on Moving Being, the only surviving group to gain high profile popularity from its inception, were the American postmodernists of dance, visual art, happenings and music: the artists grouped around the Cunningham Company, Cage, Rauschenberg, Johns and Cunningham himself. A cluster of movement- and text-based groups currently work in the space marked out by Moving Being, though perhaps not directly under their influence.