This vivid, inspiring collection of essays explores the general outlines, the retrospective guidelines, the facts, the falsehoods, and the possible future of experimental performance from the fin de siècle onward. It asks less what the “avant-garde” is than how it has been considered, and in so doing, suggests a preliminary structure for a long-needed genealogy of ideas of the groundbreaking, anarchic, and simply the “new,” in performance history.