I can't say that I've been to something avant garde, expecting it to be bad and have it turn out better. This is partially because until our discussions in Performance Analysis I did not know what avant garde actually meant. I believed it meant a specific type of performance style. The style that is stereotyped and mocked. I didn't think anyone performed avant garde art outside of New York City or Berlin. Believing it to be a genre and not a movement it never occurred to me I might have seen avant garde art.
Rather than trying to think of something that has flipped the narrative for me I've been trying to think of what performances I've seen that fit in to an avant garde movement relevant to when I saw the performance and what the performance was. I'm often ignorant about a performance when I go to see it. I may not realize that it is pushing boundaries of an art form. Like wise, a performance may be in a well established tradition, yet still blow my mind.
For a good experience in what I think was avant garde I recall seeing a performance of Yael Rasooly's Paper Cut
The plot follows a woman as she enacts an elaborate murder romance fantasy using paper objects, book pages and paper cut outs of actor from black and white films. It is performed entirely at her work desk. Often times the performance involved very little movement but relied on the power of a still image to evoke a response in the audience I went to see the performance not knowing much about the show. What I saw I wouldn't have thought possible. In the end I left more encouraged, and more open to possibilities in the creation of my own original work.