Download Notes from A THEATRE OF CRUELTY File

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Notes from a
THEATRE
OF
CRUELTY
by ANTONIN ARTAUD
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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.
Psychology, which works relentlessly to reduce the unknown to the known, to the
quotidian and the ordinary, is the cause of the theater's abasement and its fearful
loss of energy, which has finally reached its lowest point.
The belief in a fluid materiality of the soul is indispensable to the actor's craft. To
know that a passion is material, that it is subject to the plastic fluctuations of the
material, makes accessible an empire of passions that extend our sovereignty.
Furthermore, when we speak the word "life", it must be understood we are
not referring to life as we know it from the surface of fact, but to that fragile,
fluctuating center which forms never reach. And if there is one hellish, truly
accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, when instead
we should become as victims burning at the stake, signaling each other
through the flames.
And what is infinity? We do not know exactly. It is a word we use to indicate
WIDENING of our consciousness towards an inordinate, inexhaustible
feasibility.
To make metaphysics out of a spoken language is to make the language express what
it does not ordinarily express. It is to make use of it in a new, exceptional and
unaccustomed fashion; to reveal its possibilities for producing physical shock; to deal
with intonations in an absolutely concrete manner, restoring their power to shatter as
well as to really manifest something and finally, to consider language as Incantation.
The true purpose of the theatre is to create Myths, to express life in its immense
universal aspect, and from that life to extract images in which we find pleasure in
discovering ourselves.
If our life lacks a constant magic, it is because we choose to observe our acts and
lose ourselves in consideration of their imagined form instead of being impelled by
their force. No matter how loudly we clamor for magic in our lives, we are really
afraid of pursuing an existence entirely under its influence and sign.
http://www.paratheatrical.com/artaud.html
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2 images of Antonin Artaud
Theatre of Cruelty
Artaud believed that theatre should affect the audience as much as possible, therefore he used a mixture of strange and
disturbing forms of lighting, sound, and other performance elements.
In his book The Theatre and Its Double, which contained the first and second manifesto for a
"Theatre of Cruelty," Artaud expressed his admiration for Eastern forms of theatre,
particularly the Balinese. He admired Eastern theatre because of the codified, highly
ritualized and precise physicality of Balinese dance performance, and advocated what he
called a "Theatre of Cruelty". At one point, he stated that by cruelty he meant not sadism or
causing pain, but just as often a violent, physical determination to shatter the false reality. He
believed that text had been a tyrant over meaning, and advocated, instead, for a theatre made
up of a unique language, halfway between thought and gesture. Artaud described the
spiritual in physical terms, and believed that all theatre is physical expression in space.
The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive
conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements
that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but
not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it
must be paid.
– Antonin Artaud, The Theatre of Cruelty, in The Theory of the Modern Stage (ed. Eric Bentley), Penguin, 1968, p.66
Evidently, Artaud's various uses of the term cruelty must be examined to fully understand his ideas. Lee Jamieson has
identified four ways in which Artaud used the term cruelty. First, it is employed metaphorically to describe the essence of
human existence. Artaud believed that theatre should reflect his nihilistic view of the universe, creating an uncanny
connection between his own thinking and Nietzsche's.
[Nietzsche's] definition of cruelty informs Artaud's own, declaring that all art embodies and intensifies the underlying
brutalities of life to recreate the thrill of experience ... Although Artaud did not formally cite Nietzsche, [their writing]
contains a familiar persuasive authority, a similar exuberant phraseology, and motifs in extremis ...
– Lee Jamieson, Antonin Artaud: From Theory to Practice, Greenwich Exchange, 2007, p.21-22
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Artaud's second use of the term (according to Jamieson), is as a form of discipline. Although Artaud wanted to "reject form
and incite chaos" (Jamieson, p. 22), he also promoted strict discipline and rigor in his performance techniques. A third use
of the term was ‘cruelty as theatrical presentation’. The Theatre of Cruelty aimed to hurl the spectator into the centre of the
action, forcing them to engage with the performance on an instinctive level. For Artaud, this was a cruel, yet necessary act
upon the spectator designed to shock them out of their complacency:
Artaud sought to remove aesthetic distance, bringing the audience into direct contact
with the dangers of life. By turning theatre into a place where the spectator is exposed
rather than protected, Artaud was committing an act of cruelty upon them.
– Lee Jamieson, Antonin Artaud: From Theory to Practice, Greenwich Exchange, 2007, p.23
Artaud wanted to (but never did) put the audience in the middle of the 'spectacle' (his term for the play), so they
would be 'engulfed and physically affected by it'. He referred to this layout as being like a 'vortex' - a constantly
shifting shape - 'to be trapped and powerless'.
Philosophical views
Imagination, to Artaud, was reality; he considered dreams, thoughts and delusions as no less real than the
"outside" world. To him, reality appeared to be a consensus, the same consensus the audience accepts when
they enter a theatre to see a play and, for a time, pretend that what they are seeing is real.
Artaud saw suffering as essential to existence and thus rejected all utopias as inevitable dystopia. He
denounced the degradation of civilization, yearned for cosmic purification, and called for an ecstatic loss of
the self.
ARTAUD Quotes
“When we speak the word ''life',' it must be understood we are not referring to
life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center
which forms never reach.”
“The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything -- gestures,
sounds, words, screams, light, darkness -- rediscovers itself at precisely the
point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations. To
break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the
theatre.”
 French dramatist, poet, actor, and theoretician of the Surrealist movement who attempted to replace
the “bourgeois” classical theatre with his “theatre of cruelty,” a primitive ceremonial
experience intended to liberate the human subconscious and reveal man to himself.
THE CENCI
In 1935, Artaud staged The Cenci, his adaptation of the texts by Shelley and Stendhal.
Le Cenci was destined by Artaud to establish a closer contact between actors and spectators than the normal
theater could ever realize. In this production mechanical devices were used to create a visible and audible
frenzy: strident and dissonant sound effects, whirling stage sets, the effects of storms by means of light,
unusual speech effects. The production was a failure.
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The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a
passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent
rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on
which it is based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody
when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind
of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be
paid (Antonin Artaud, The Theatre of Cruelty).
Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double (1938)
A Presentation for the Performance Theory Seminar
I. Texts and Contexts.
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Stanislavski; Brecht; Artaud; Craig
Grotowski; Brook; Schechner
Brecht; Beckett; Genet; (popular, political, community, theatre for development)
[Adamov, Genet, Arrabal, Beckett / Weiss, Gatti / Blin, Barrault, Vilar, Planchon, Brook, Marowitz, Grotowski, Kantor /
Living Theatre, Open Theater, Bread & Puppet Theatre, La Mama, Théâtre du Soleil, happenings, Cunningham, Béjart,
Pina Bausch, performance art]
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Claude Schumacher, ed. (1989). Artaud on Theatre.
Susie J. Tharu. (1984). The Sense of Performance: Post-Artaud Theatre.
Jonas Barish. (1981). The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice.
Raymond Williams. (1989). The Politics of Modernism.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. (1972). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
II. Critical Readings.
Though many of those theatre-artists proclaimed an Artaudian lineage (Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Brook, Richard Schechner
among them) the Artaud they invoke is marked by a commitment as ahistorical and transcendent as their own. The aim of
this study, then is to search out the other Artaud and the tradition he was midwife to.
(Tharu 1984, 11-12)
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.
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The concept of "political theatre", for obvious reasons, is associated mainly with the second tendency. But it would be
wrong to overlook altogether the political effects of the first tendency which, with an increasing emphasis on themes of
madness, disruptive violence and liberating sexuality, came through to dominate Western avant-garde theatre in a later
period, especially after 1950. One element in this domination has been what can been seen as a failure in that most extreme
political tendency--the Bolshevik variant of Socialism--which had attached itself to the ideas and projects of the working
class. Postwar history, and especially the Soviet experience, has made the brave early affiliations evidently problematic.
Yet, since both tendencies are still active, and in changing proportions, it is important to identify them, within the
generalities of avant-garde theatre, at the point where they most clearly began to diverge.
(Williams 1989, 87-88)
My dear friend,
I believe I have found a suitable title for my book.
It will be:
THE THEATRE AND ITS DOUBLE
for if theatre doubles life, life doubles true theatre, but it has nothing to do with Oscar Wilde's ideas on Art. This title will
comply with all the doubles of the theatre which I thought I'd found for so many years: metaphysics, plague, cruelty,
the pool of energies which constitute Myths, which man no longer embodies, is embodied by the theatre. By this
double I mean the great magical agent of which the theatre, through its forms, is only the figuration on its way to becoming
the transfiguration.
It is on the stage that the union of thought, gesture and action is reconstructed. And the double of the Theatre is reality
untouched by the men of today.
Artaud, Letter to Jean Paulhan.
25th January, 1936.
(Schumacher 1989, 87-88)
Artaud's idea of "cruelty": a mode in which one is shocked bodily into an awareness of the undomesticated or the uncanny.
It is as if, suddenly, in the midst of reassuringly familiar forms, a space opens up, lit by a strange light.
(Tharu 1984, 57)
The cutting edge of this critique is the attempted breakthrough to authentic individual experience from below the
standardized consciousness, or in the very demonstration of the impossibility of such a break. There is then a movement
from presenting the bourgeois world as at once domineering and grotesque to an insistence--in certain forms a satisfied and
even happy insistence--that changing this is impossible, is indeed literally inconceivable while the dominant consciousness
bears down. This takes a special form in theatre in what is offered as a rejection of language. 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
pressure 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.
(Williams 1989, 93)
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. With the actor
discarded as a representative of humanity, or swallowed up in his distorting masks and exaggerating costumes, with the
division annulled between stage and spectator, theater becomes a participatory rite meant to arouse and overwhelm the
spectator with intense states of consciousness. Whether in joy or panic, he is made to merge directly with his fellows, to
submerge his consciousness in theirs, to experience reality unmediated, instead of seeing it transferred or delegated to
others.
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(Barish 1981, 455)
It demands that we consider the phenomenon, not for the end it achieves in the world, (its utility or function) but as a sign
that reveals, through its transformation of the act into the spectacular, the sense or the lived meaning of that gesture. This
sense, Artaud never allows us to ignore, is a sense that must arise from a bodily being in the world. The theatre is not
concerned with the total clarity that comes from a possession of the object any more than it is with imitation, he insists. Its
fascination is carnal; complete.
(Tharu 1984, 59-60)
Such theatre, however, does not merely "frame" an event from real life turning it into spectacle by the very act . . . .
What the theatre does, rather, is to aid this transformation, by locating in the outer event the sources that speak to the body
and swelling these out or taking them to their limit . . . . One works by creating "temptations, vacuums" around ideas and
things. Vacuums that draw the body towards the object which then reveals itself. . . .
To create a space thus, at a pre-thematic, corporeal level, is not merely to present something, but also to take us back
to the very origins of these struggles, where all the "powers of nature are newly rediscovered."
(Tharu 1984, 60)
I will devote myself from now on
exclusively
to the theatre
as I conceive it,
a theatre of blood,
a theatre which at each performance will stir
something
in the body
of the performer as well as the spectator of the play,
but actually,
the actor does not perform,
he creates.
Theatre is in reality the genesis of creation:
It will come about.
Artaud, Letter to Paule Thévenin.
Tuesday 24th February, 1948.
(Schumacher 1989, 200)