Madness, disruptive violence and liberating sexuality. Madness as an alternative to a sanity defined and identified by its own repressiveness. The double, as a magical agent, intangible and unseizable of which the theatre through its forms, is a figuration on the way to becoming a transfiguration. The double of the theatre being reality untouched…Text was tyrannically subordinating meaning, forcing it into a linearity within convention that stifled what he called “physical expression in space”. Theatre, to Artaud, should be made up of a new and unique language that would occupy a dimension that hovered between thought, a mental process and physical gesture, that whould shatter all existing archetypes and open the gates to a new and bold conception of individual identity. …
Despite the pain and his drifting into the Shadowland, Antonin Artaud went on to write his manifesto for the Theatre of Cruelty, a text that later appeared with four or five other articles in a book called The Theatre and Its Double, which was certainly both influential and inflammatory.
Artaud:I employ the word "cruelty" in the sense of an appetite for life, a cosmic rigor, an implacable necessity, in the gnostic sense of a living whirlwind that devours the darkness; it is the consequence of an act. Everything that acts is a cruelty. It is upon this idea of extreme action, pushed beyond all limits, that theatre must be rebuilt. Gifted actors find by instinct how to tap and radiate certain powers; but they would be astonished if it were revealed that these powers, which have their material trajectory by and in the organs, actually exist, for they never realized that these sources of energy actually exist in their own bodies, in their organs. image:http://www.shadowhousepits.com.au/releasing%20a%20theatre%20of%20cruelty.htm
It is from these wholly alternative emphases that we can define, within the vigorous and overlapping experimental drama and theatre, the eventually distinguishable forms of “subjective” and “social” Expressionism. New names were eventually found for these avant-garde methods, mainly because of these differences and complications of purpose. What was still there in common was the refusal of reproduction: in staging, in language, in character presentation. But one tendency was moving towards that new form of bourgeois dissidence which, in its very emphasis on subjectivity, rejected the discourse of any public world as irrelevant to its deeper concerns. Sexual liberation, the emancipation of dream and fantasy, a new interest in madness as an alternative to repressive sanity, a rejection of ordered language as a form of concealed but routine domination: these were now seen, in this tendency, which culminated in Surrealism and Artaud’s “Theatre of Cruelty”, as the real dissidence, breaking alike from bourgeois society and from the forms of opposition to it which had been generated within its terms. On the other hand, the opposite, more political tendency offered to renounce the bourgeoisie altogether: to move from dissidence to conscious affiliation with the working class: in early Soviet theatre, Piscator and Toller, eventually Brecht. Read More: http://homepages.tesco.net/~theatre/tezzaland/webstuff/ArtaudPres.html
"Antonio Artaud died alone at the foot of his bed with a shoe in his hand after years of struggling to change the world of performance with his self-styled 'Theatre of Cruelty'. Just as I began to wonder why anybody would wish to create such a horrible concept, the life of the mad Frenchman was resurrected by Damian Wright. Creeping around the stage he darted in and out of the shadows' taking the audience into the strange and disturbed life of Artaud. And what a life it was; hereditary syphilis, imagined confrontations with Hitler, drug addiction, electro-convulsive therapy. All the deepest, darkest aspects of this tortured soul were brought to life in stark comedic fashion. " Read More: http://www.blundells.org/academic/drama/past-prods_visiting.htm
Unlike the other great theorist of the twentieth-century theatre, Bertolt Brecht, Artaud was not gifted at translating complex theory into a digestible vehicle for his ideas. Nor did he have a laboratory like the Berliner Ensemble. Brecht built up a catalogue that perpetuated and expanded upon his doctrine. Artaud could be seen more as a prophet announcing a new theatrical age without actually realizing its fruition. If his writing sounded a bit foggy and unclear, it is simply because Artaud was articulating the poetic vision of a man who passionately and somewhat naively believed that society could be changed, transformed, through the privileged art form of the theatre, instead of through a list of stage directions.
By cruelty, Artaud said, he meant not necessarily the conventional sense of sadism or inflicting deliberate injury, legal tort, but more as a violent, physical intention of shattering false reality. “We are not free. And the sky can fall on our heads. And the theatre exists first to teach us that…I propose to return the theatre to this magic and elementary idea, picked up by modern psychoanalysis,which consists, to heal the sick, in making thm adopt the external attitude of the state to which they should be brought.”
Artaud. Portrait of Colette Allendy. "For Artaud, the theatre is life, and not merely a mirror of it. Since he, like the Romantics, wanted life to be spontaneous, authentic, primitive, and wild, he lived these emotions out on the stage. Primarily, Artaud portrayed emotions of pain, agony and madness, and did this through random screaming and incomprehensible mutters. He felt that these emotions are present in everyone, but are suppressed because of a fear of exposing them for the rest of the world to see. In his writing, Artaud expressed his belief that people are suppressing emotion and, therefore, not partaking in the full experience of life: “I want to give them the experience itself, The plague itself, So they will be terrified,...Read More:http://www.dacko.ca/joanna/bigimages/romanticism%20and%20antonin%20artaud.pdf image:
In his revolt against the kind of theatre that tells a standard narrative, with the actors partitioned from the audience, Artaud did away with the conventional script and the traditional sense of the stage. In the most intense situations, he said, words are inadequate and are replaced by screams or gestures. Thus, the role of language would be minimal. Words should be used for their vibratory quality than for what they represent. And if the distinguishing feature between prehistoric individuals and modern individuals is the use of language to communicate….
Instead of a stage, Artaud wanted to use a hangar or a loft, the way churches were used for Passion plays. The spectator would sit in the middle, enveloped by the play and the actors; scenes would start like fires at different points of the hall and would also spread like fires. There should be no written plays; they were to be replaced by mythical themes, like the story of Bluebeard or the Capture of Jerusalem, situations full of violence and movement that would contain the necessary dose of cruelty.
---If words "arrest and paralyse thought" it may be possible, as Artaud hoped, to substitute "for the spoken language a different language of nature, whose expressive possibilities will be equal to verbal language": a theatre of visual movement and of the body. In such ways, the fixed forms of representation can be perpetually broken, not by establishing new forms but by showing their persistent
sure and tyranny. One main emphasis within this is to render all activity and speech as illusory and to value theatre, in its frankly illusory character, as the privileged bearer of this universal truth.---Read More: http://homepages.tesco.net/~theatre/tezzaland/webstuff/ArtaudPres.html image: http://www.hastac.org/blogs/ryan-platt/notation-exhibition-adkzkm
As for the actor, his main requirement should be proper breathing; he must be what Artaud called “an athlete of the senses” . The essential dramatic problem however, should always be how to take a spatial unit and make it eloquent, “like mines in a rock cliff that bring forth geysers.” Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty is an ideal theatre that was never meant to be staged. Artaud never delved into the nuts and bolts of how to obtain the eloquence of language or how to maintain dramatic coherence without the focus of a stage. Following his instructions literally, would lead to a type of solemn pandemonium without an aura or traces of humor.
ADDENDUM:
Discursive language is inadequate for awakening these hidden emotions since it tends to drive the audience into its habitual way of thought. For this reason, Artaud rejects the theatre of psychological depiction and advocates what he calls “The Theatre of Cruelty,” which abandons narrative language and presents concrete physical language. Artaud’s physical language consists of “everything that can be manifested and expressed materially on a stage and that is addressed first of all to the senses instead of being addressed primarily to the mind as is the language of words” . Verbal language can be employed only when it is used “in the form of incantation [to produce] physical shock” in Artaud’s theatre . The actors move with “evocative gestures” and “emotive attitudes” . Lights are used in “new ways of spreading the light in waves, in sheets, in fusillades of fiery arrows . . . producing the sensations of heat, cold, anger, fear, etc.” . Musical instruments are employed for evocative effects by producing “vibrations of absolutely new sounds” . “Hieroglyphic characters,” “ritual costumes,” and “manikins” replace the stage set to “enforce the concrete aspect of every image and every expression” . The audience is seated in the middle of the stage so that it can be “engulfed and physically affected” all around . The whole spectacles envelop the audience and immerse it in a constant flow of lights, images, movements, and sounds in Artaud’s theatre….
Barish:The spectator, a detached observer no longer, would be engulfed by the spectacle, bombarded by colors, lights, and sounds. About him would swirl huge masks, giant mannekins, hieroglyphics, objects "of strange proportions," and creatures "in ritual costumes." All this so as to subvert his judgment and unseat his normal sense of himself, send seismic shock waves coursing through him, to teach him his helplessness in the face of the powers that rule human life. Though Artaud's doctrine of helplessness stands at the opposite pole from the message of freedom which Rousseau wished to promote through his civic festivals--though indeed it recalls the antique doctrine of fate which Rousseau regarded as one of the most odious features of classical drama, and made him long to abolish it--nevertheless Artaud shares with Rousseau, as also with the backward-looking Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy, a vision of theater as a mass event in which impersonation disappears, fiction vanishes, and the spectator loses himself amid the swarm of excitants that assail him. Read More: http://homepages.tesco.net/~theatre/tezzaland/webstuff/ArtaudPres.html image: http://gabrio76.deviantart.com/art/Brecht-y-Artaud-101116962
…In using the concrete language, Artaud’s final aim does not lie in eliciting the audience’s emotions but provoking its deep understanding of reality. The audience’s mechanical mode of thought paralyzed its intellectual capacity to see into reality. Artaud feels that the audience, to revive this intellectual capacity, needs strong shock which Artaud translates into his own term, “cruelty”: “one does not separate the mind from the body nor the senses from the intelligence, especially in a domain where the endlessly renewed fatigue of the organs requires intense and sudden shocks to revive our understanding” . Once its hidden emotions are brought to the surface by the shocking effect of the concrete language, the audience understands these emotions are dangerous and destructive powers that lead to hatred and violence in its everyday realities. Since the audience leaves the theatre with this recognition, Artaud’s theatre serves to purge the audience of its dark emotions, inviting it to confront the world “in a state of deepened and keener perception” .Read More: http://www.cnu.ac.kr/~sunjung/bb-vitrac&artaud.htm
Read More:http://www.scribd.com/doc/39499286/Artaud-Antonin-The-Theater-and-Its-Double
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