![]() ![]() The message may be trivial, but Artaud's writing is lively. ![]() The end result is a book that feels repetitive and rather banal. Some of the arguments, presumably ground-breaking at the time, have been so thoroughly absorbed in later theoretical and artistic developments that they seem obvious. This is one of those books that seems cursed by having been too influential. But there's a palpable sense that what he's groping towards is a kind of a limit that life tends to as a primordial source from which it draws its vigour, but is not itself that. Often times Artuad is at pains to explain his theses in practical terms. "Cruelty signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination" Rather, it is an abstract principle that life insofar as an conscious effort on its own part to discriminate itself from unlife obeys to the nth degree. In the Balinese theater, for example, the distinction between background and foreground collapse under the immense abstract weight of the costumes, the sound of the thunderous musical accompaniments that threaten to become gestures in their own right, and the geometric lines articulated by sudden and mechanical sliding, twisting, and turning of the heads, limbs and wrists.Īrtuad notoriously fancies "cruelty" as the essential dimension of this Theater.īut cruelty is something wholly other than bloodshed, at least according to Artuad. The Director prostrates before the Author, the stage before the text, the non-discursive materiality of the word before the written text.įrustrated by the emanciation of Theater into a pathetic, anaemic screen on which our psychological and moral squabbles are half projected and half resolved, Artuad proposes that we break out of the dictactorship of written text and restore to Theater its original destiny as a spectacle of equal convulsion, impulse, and vigour as the phenomenon of life itself. ![]() The Occidental theatre has lost its magic to make a metaphysics out of gestures, lighting, movements, in the short, the whole mise en scene, proclaims Artuad. Even then, I found much of what Artuad says in this manifesto to be surprisingly accessible. Frustrated by the emanciation of Theater into a pathe I'm practically a phillistine when it comes to fine arts. The Director prostrates before the Author, the stage before the text, the non-discursive materiality of the word before the written text. I'm practically a phillistine when it comes to fine arts. ![]()
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