1 Peer Reviewed Exclusive to Modernism/modernity Print Plus Modernist Afterlives In Performance—Inside Ibsen: Avant-Garde Institutionality and Time in Vinge/Müller’s Ibsen-Saga Oct 10, 2019 By: Andrew Friedman Volume 4, Cycle 3 https://doi.org/10.26597/mod.0125 The theatre only has one chance, when it understands itself as an instrument of deceleration against the general acceleration of life, information and perception. Theatre is the Stone Age, but it can teach you how to see. —Heiner Müller[1] Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller’s performance series, the Ibsen-Saga (2006–), is an extraordinary limit case for staging Henrik Ibsen’s expansive internal temporalities. The Saga uses Ibsen’s works, in the words of Heiner Müller, as “an instrument of deceleration against the general acceleration of life” (Barnett, “Müller’s Hamlet/Machine,” 197). The Saga slows the sense of the present through a dramaturgy of open-ended performances in which the content and length are rarely predetermined, with works lasting upwards of two weeks without intermission or ending after forty-five minutes.[2] The unpredictability of the Saga’s performances—inspired by the latent Romantic idealism of Ibsen’s plays—challenges the ability of institutions to regulate time in relation to labor and the larger economy. The Saga declares art’s autonomy from institutional oversight by confronting the temporal limits of theatre production in the twenty-first century. Like its antecedent in the historical avant-gardes, the Saga employs time as a tool to differentiate itself—and art—from the realities of the world. Attending to the idealism of Ibsen’s plays, the Saga conjures the avant-garde inside Ibsen to challenge the institutional regulation of time, illuminating the limits of contemporary theatre. The complexion of a twenty-first-century theatrical avant-garde is a point of persistent speculation. Energizing the discourse is a counter-narrative of the avant-gardes’ death, a body of criticism that Mike Sell dubs the “Eulogist School.”[3] The death blow is commonly attributed to the institutional entrenchment of contemporary artists. Nestled within funding structures, degree- granting programs, and international touring circuits, would-be avant-gardists have, in Richard Schechner’s estimation, become “conservative.”[4] Their conservatism manifests itself in an apolitical and traditionalist art, uncritical of the forces that shape its production and distribution. Gate-keeping curators or their emissaries (most notably intolerant funders and audiences) scrub