Antonin Artaud was a French actor, costume designer and writer who revolutionized drama with his “Theater of Cruelty” idea.
Synopsis
Born in Marseille, France, on September 4, 1896, Antonin Artaud worked as an actor onstage and in film with works like La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc. He was involved in the surrealist movement as a writer and came up with the idea known as “The Theater of Cruelty,” which argued that drama must abandon its emphasis on text and rely on more mysterious, primal expressions of sound, movement and light. Artaud died on March 4, 1948, in Ivry-sur-Seine, France.
http://www.biography.com/people/antonin-artaud-9189906
Summary
The subject matter of theatre
- Surrealist dramas
- Highly charged, immensely detailed scenarios
- Renaissance Revenge tragedy
The political purpose or message or dramatic intention
- To shock by the power of the spectacle
- To subvert and challenge bourgeois theatre
- Violence contained
- A sensory experience
The Actor-Audience relationship
- Audience sitting in the middle of the action
- the actor as a figure in ritual acts
- The audience in a centre of a vortex
The staging form adopted
- A space stripped bare
- Total theatre
- Anti-realist
Directorial interpretation / production style
- Gothic/Romantic sources
- Every aspect taken to extremes
- Concerned with the metaphysical
Design elements
- Surrealist
- Actors representative of emotional states
- Fractured and unsettling
Role of actors and performance style
- Anti character
- Sounds to replace accepted language
- Athletic bodies with well-trained voices
- Gestural
Technical elements
- Amplified sound to underscore the text
- Strongly directional lighting
- Changes in scale
Audience response
- To be moved and shocked by the show
- To have an intense sensory experience and be changed by this
- Catharsis encouraged
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