'Moli're was not just a playwright,' wrote scholar Ethan Mordden. 'Moli're was a thespian, wholly of the theater, and his compositions breach the gulf between literature and performance, between language as its own art and language as a tool of art.' Like Shakespeare, who was an actor first, Moli're

Clever, Dystopic, Excessive, Funny, In-your-face, Ironic, Renaissance theater

In the mid-'80s, Pina Bausch's Dance Theater Wuppertal, from Germany, began to make a racket on the international scene with exhaustive, often violent forays into sex and gender. One person paying special attention was Lloyd Newson. Unhappy with the way dance emphasized technique at the cost of meani

Athleticism, Body politic/identity dance, Homoerotic, In-your-face, Masculine, Phallic, Physical force

It has been said that no photograph ever captured the mysterious allure of Vaslav Nijinsky. The cameras of his time were too slow to capture the spectacular height of his leap, and static images could never depict the sensuality of his dancing. Both men and women were drawn to his powerfully expressi

In-your-face, Melancholy, Opulent, Pioneering, Severe, Sexy, The early russians

"To me, the television is sex, the bed is sex, the sky is sex, you're sex, I'm sex, everything is sex." Annie Sprinkle flies bare-breasted and smiling in the face of art-world pretension. Her work, a marriage of performance, pornography, spirituality, and science, is the undiluted product of 25 y

Bad girl art, Ebullient, Feminist theater, In-your-face, Joyful, Opulent, Repetitive, Sexy, Technology