Survey
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
Improvisational theatre wikipedia , lookup
Development of musical theatre wikipedia , lookup
Medieval theatre wikipedia , lookup
History of theatre wikipedia , lookup
Theatre of the Absurd wikipedia , lookup
Augsburger Puppenkiste wikipedia , lookup
English Renaissance theatre wikipedia , lookup
Theatre of France wikipedia , lookup
Theatre of the Oppressed wikipedia , lookup
1 Notes from a THEATRE OF CRUELTY by ANTONIN ARTAUD 2 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 3 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 4 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. 5 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. 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] 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. 6 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. 7 (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)