"Never tire yourself more than necessary, even if you have to found a culture on the fatigue of your bones."
Artaud believed that theatre should represent reality and, therefore, 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 exclusively sadism or causing pain, but just as often a violent, physical determination to shatter the falsereality. 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 idea of a theatre of cruelty . He therefore tried to provoke conditions that would force the release of primitive instincts he believed were hidden beneath the civilised social veneer masking all human behaviour. Describing the energy and impact of a radical new way of performing and responding in strong and often dark imagery, he envisioned a theatre that rejected rational interpretation. Instead, he welcomed the irrational impulses that could be stimulated by suffering and pain and argued that every facet of theatricality should be employed to increase a sense of danger, violence and disorientation in the audience. However, Artaud argued that his concept of cruelty was not sadistic. He wanted to stimulate what was honest and true and the cruelty he envisaged required a rigour and determination that was necessary if performers and audiences were to confront and experience the dark and terrifying responses that lay at the heart of each human being.
was first introduced by Antonin Artaud to describe a form of theatre that he hoped would unleash unconscious responses in audiences and performers that were normally inaccessible. Artaud was opposed to theatrical productions based on venerated classical texts or established literary forms and thought they merely represented worlds that were irrelevant and highly artificial constructions. He wanted audiences to find in the theatre not an area for escape from the world, but the realisation of their worst nightmares and deepest fears.Taken from http://dlibrary.acu.edu.au/staffhome/siryan/academy/theatres/theatre%20of%20cruelty.htm
Dairy Log
Today we studied artaudian theatre and so to "affect the audience as much as possible" we searched the school for the best place to do so which we decided would be under the stage as it you can get a full blackout under there and so the audience would loose one of their senses. Then the class split in half and we was given a set of actions to peform to/on the other members of the class to play on their senses, which involved alot of sound. My half of the class would be the first audience; the performance actually, instead of scaring me, really excited me, it was a completely new type of performance to me and was actually done really well. When it was my turn to perform I really enjoyed that the underneath of the stage was filled with props and so when hitting these against various other props, or around the room, my audience would react in a different way to each different prop. They for our next performance, as a class for/on our teacher, we added strobe lighting which meant our acting skills would be more required to which I expressed myself as quite animistic and clung to the darkness as my ally.
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