Synnyt / Origins | 3 / 2017 1 Calling the dragon – the fve avant-gardes today? Anette Arlander Abstract Is the term avant-garde meaningful today beyond its historical use? Can it be used as an analytical tool in some way? In “The fve avant-gardes or… or none?” Richard Schechner (1993) suggested that we distinguish a historical avant-garde, a constant- ly changing current avant-garde, a future oriented avant-garde, a tradition seeking avant-garde and an intercultural avant-garde. By looking at the project Calling the Dragon from 2012, as (if it was) avant-garde this paper explores these fve ways of understanding the term in a contemporary context. Is the term avant-garde meaningful today beyond its historical use? Can it be used as an analytical tool in some way? Te question of the contempo- rary avant-garde was discussed this spring by the Finnish Avant-garde and Modernism Network (FAM 2017); although the main focus of the network is on historical investigations some relatively recent events in the 1980’s were debated as well (Hautamäki 2017). Tis prompted me to return to a paper “Calling the Dragon – avant-garde or not?” presented at Performance Studies International conference at Shanghai Teatre Academy, China 4-8.7. 2014 (PSi #20), with the all-encompassing theme Avant-Garde, Tradition, Community. In “Te fve avant-gardes or… Or none?” theatre director and performance theorist Richard Schechner (1993) suggested that we distinguish a historical avant-garde, a constantly changing current avant-garde, a future oriented avant-garde, a tradition seeking avant-garde and an intercultural avant-garde. Are these distinctions valid beyond theatre and performing arts, the concerns of Schechner? Are they useful in understanding practices within contempo- rary art? In order to respond to those questions, I will use as an example the project Calling the Dragon from 2012, which was part of a series of works performing landscape for camera, in the border zone between performance