Antonin Artaud

Theatre of Cruelty

Artaud (1896-1948) is well known throughout theatre for his work on, “Theatre and its Double.” He was a French dramatist, poet, essayist, actor, and theatre director, who to this day remains to be one of the most influential theorists of our time. His aim was to disrupt the relationship between performer and audience using philosophy, discipline and surrealism. His work was meant to wake the audience up, provoke a reaction, one that got the heart pumping and the nerves buzzing.

What makes his work so different from others however is the fact that he confronts the audience with verbal sounds and actions instead of speaking, ones that connect to emotions and go beyond the boundaries of human nature.

Artaud hated how scripts and text restricted the actor from doing certain things and wanted a truly liberated theatre that was not held back by them. He wanted it to come from the soul!

He used elements of surrealism, so no characters the audience could bond to, language to be gestural and non verbal, patterns of sound could become traditional speech replacing it entirely.

‘The Theatre of Cruelty unravels conflicts, liberates powers, releases potential and if these and the powers are dark, this is not the fault of the plague or theatre, but life.’
Antonin Artaud

My class performed a ritual, only using verbal sounds and actions around a chocolate bar when we first started Artuad’s work; we were all very confused but had a laugh when we finally realized what our teacher Nat was doing. We took our shoes and socks off making it feel more tribal as we all came to circle, the chocolate bar hanging from the ceiling in the middle. We did this for about 5 minutes, getting louder in some moments before switching to a whisper, the only word we kept repeating was chocolate because that was what it was all about, nothing else mattered. We then came to a stand still and Natalie brought the chocolate bar down to us and opened it; Awo in the background was banging a drum as the rest of us carried on saying chocolate before we all hummed in satisfaction when receiving a piece of the chocolate, this carried on until it was all gone.

Once finishing the ritual, we went on to a game that was based round the senses only. In groups we were blind folded and were given different objects and foods to touch, the rest writing down our responses being we didn’t know what we were touching. There was loads of different reactions, mine wasn’t very interesting but some of the group screamed and squirmed mainly over the kidney beans which was very funny. Its very fascinating how we all reacted differently.

We also did another exercise where using physical movement expressed an emotion with our bodies and not just our facial expressions. The three emotions my group used was sensual, frightened and quiver.

Sensual, frightened and quiver. Sensory.
We then performed it in direct opposition. Frightened with the movement for sensual, quiver with the movement for frightened and sensual with the movement for quiver.
Physicalising senses.

Robot Wars, a game where one person controls another, language being gestural and non verbal.

Why did they have to film my worst one! I tied in my first go! I didn’t even know they used my friends as obstacles either!

Summary

Artaud’s dramatic intention was for a sensory experience, be anti-realist have the performance itself to be visually striking and contain as much violence as possible in order to get a disturbed response out of his audience but also moved.

It was to be a surrealist drama with vivid detail, unsettling scenery, characters and imagery. The actors had to be physically fit but also athletic, have strong powerful voices and be willing to go beyond what is required of an actor.

Puppets and masks make the whole scenario creepier because you cannot see the actor’s face as well as breaking the relationship between the actor and audience. Overall making it a surreal experience.

The audience should remain in the middle of the action at all times and go away thinking differently about the subject the play is about. They should also be catharsis which means feel good because they’ve released a repressed emotion when watching Artaud’s work, they should feel relief.