Antonin Artaud

Early life 

Antonin Artaud was a Dramatist, Poet, Essayist, Actor and Theatre Director, born on September 4th 1896 in Marseilles.

He was widely recognized as one of the most significant figures of the 20th century theatre and the European avant-garde.

At the age of 4 he suffered from meningitis, which resulted in him having an edgy, short-tempered personality throughout his teenage years. He also suffered from speech defect and clinical depression. 

In 1920 after being discharged from the sanatorium due to sleepwalking, he moved to Paris, to pursue a career as a writer. This was when he realized his passion for experimental theatre.   


Background info 

He was a playwright for a couple of plays during his lifetime, but he used a considerable amount of influence with his small set of works.

He was a great French playwright and was also known for his theoretical writings. He was involved with the Surrealist movement for a short while early in his career. which influenced multiple of his works.

He decided early on that a new kind of theatre was needed, therefore he created the famous, 'Theatre of Cruelty' concept, which included importance on script and on the the primitive expressions of movement, combined with light and sound.

His plays were generally focused on human behavior and raw human emotions, many of which were insulted and even disregarded by numerous people. He was an inventive writer as well and regularly contributed to weekly's like the journal, 'Litterature'. A few of his significant pieces of work include 'Art and Death' and 'the Theatre and its Double', through which he conveyed the ideas for the creation of a new type of theatre, which he hoped would transform the impressions of the-then theatrical experiences.


Brief Biography 


No other figure in the quite recent history of theatre has been so attacked for his dreams for a new type of theatre and so misunderstood as he was.

He had been labelled as a prophet, a martyr, a cult figure, a madman and a drug addict. His ideas and theories were linked with his life and the style in which he lived.

He was completely uncompromising, in that he advised a complete termination of the traditional boundaries between the audience and the actors. He combined this with an appeal for theatre to go back to solely an experience of the senses. Artaud was responsible for the demolishment of audience-actor boundaries and the confrontational theatre during the period after the war. 




Theory and Practice

Metaphysics-
is a difficult idea to handle with out of context, although it generally may be used to express anything that doesn't have a rational explanation.

He broke it down into a further 3 early influences, that he identified as having contributed to the creation of the Theatre of Cruelty:

• Balinese dancers
• used the effect of gesture and facial expression on the audience's unconscious
• the language of 'signs' fascinated him and appealed to the audience's senses and minds, giving them the 'hunch' that something more is being communicated  
• audience is stimulated by by gestures which formulated mental poetry, and is metaphysical 
•  
• Lot and His Daughters, a painting by Lucas van Leyden
• the painting had an inherently dramatic meaning for him 
• 
  
• The Marx brothers  
• he found the rapid juxtaposition of imagery so appealing, which could move the audience from tears to laughter 
• he did the same through such contrasts and used puppets alongside an actor to achieve this 

The plague- 

This was the 2nd double that Artaud thought he found.

This manifesto refers to a number of concerns, but above all it provides a frightening and vivid picture of the physical effects of the plague. 

He uses the plague as a parable for theatre, and he suggests that theatre should be stripped of conventional constraints and all that these imply, just as a population in the grip of the disease would be. 

He suggested a limit in reality of course, but despite this Artaud is saying that there are no real limits to which theatre cant seek.     

Cruelty-

The 3rd double is cruelty. 

Artaud indicated that the combination of the 3 presences are involved in the process of making theatre. The theatre that he visualized was one that could evoke, organize and present the unused dream images of our mind, and would hold on to us with its power and amaze us with its phenomenal presentation.    

The double-

The 4th double is the double. 

It suggest that "material existence is seen as an imperfect copy of what art - as a higher form of reality - symbolically expresses."  

This is the opposite of the accepted relationship between art and life: Artaud looked at theatre as a magnified mirror image. 

He suggests that life will take 2nd place to a complete and higher form of the real. 

His choice of the double as a metaphor wasn't an accident. His early interest in poetry of Romantics and the poems and stories of Edgar Allan Poe allowed him to come across the concept of the double during 19th century literature. 

This concept was pertinent to his own life and how the shadow of a double could provide meaning to and burden his theoretical writings.

The Theatre Of Cruelty

This is the title of two manifestos within The theatre and Its double which provides their name to an entirely new body of generalized shorthand when Artaud's writing was discussed. 

The title of Theatre of Cruelty generated a large debate since it was proposed by him, but its crucial to remember that it doesn't only refer to blood, murder and chaotic acts of torture. 

He intended the theatre to challenge and intensify the spectators' emotional response through the most carefully arranged set of situations. Through the stimulation of the physical and emotional senses, the audience needed to be kept in a constant state of uncertainty, resulting to overwhelming emotional release. 

Staging The Theatre Of Cruelty

Auditorium and audience-

The auditorium would be enclosed within 4 walls, stripped of any decorations, with the audience seated below, in the centre, on swivelling chairs, which allows them to follow the show taking place all around them.  

No other practitioner in the 20th century searched for such an essential solution to the actor-audience relationship. The idea continues to challenge us based on its emphasis on 'below' it implies that the audience is both trapped and in a powerless area. 

The problem of the audience in the middle is a vital one and it needs to be admitted, rarely achieved. He envisioned the vortex, a circular shifting shape into which the performance could arise, drawing the audience into complete sensory identification with the performance. 

The invasion of the audience by the actor was one of the most important practical developments from Artaud's theory and resulted in the creation of theatres where these boundaries were re-examined and, in a few cases, eliminated. 

Sound-

In Artaud's vision of theatre there was always a large emphasis on sound, he realised its power to engage an audience's inner sense. 

Music and instruments played a part in the mise-en-scene as well; he suggested they might be part of the set and that through 'vibrations' the audience would be charmed.  

Lighting- 

Artaud saw lighting as a force, that could be used in conjunction with other factors of staging to become an almost physical piece of the action. 

Film- 

He was an actor, so he tended to be dismissive about film and the role it may have in theatre. Can shock by its juxtaposition of imagery, of the live actor and film.