Name: 安東-阿爾陶與殘酷的戲劇：速成班戲劇#43 (Antonin Artaud and the Theatre of Cruelty: Crash Course Theater #43)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T08:13:32.000Z
Duration: 11 min 27 s
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Hey there, I'm Mike Rugnetta, and this is
Crash Course Theater.

情態副詞

Yorick, you are looking especially dead today.

Because today it's the Theater of Cruelty,
a style developed by the French genius Antonin

Artaud—a guy who believed that theater in
the West had become way too hung up on realism.

He wanted theater to get out of the living
room and to return to its origins—magic,

Today we'll be looking at Artaud's life,
and his influential book of essays and one

of his plays—the show about scorpions crawling
out of a wet nurse's vagina that you never

INTRO
Antonin Artaud was born in 1896 in Marseilles.

When he was four, he came down with meningitis.

He survived, but his health was seriously
weakened.

He had his first breakdown at sixteen, and
his parents arranged several sanitarium stays

In 1916, he was briefly conscripted into the
French army but soon discharged for sleepwalking.

He went back to the sanitarium where his doctor
prescribed opium.

And (B) a really bad idea BECAUSE IT'S OPIUM.

In his twenties, Artaud moved to Paris and
hooked up with the Surrealists, acting in

a couple of films and writing the scenario
for at least one other.

Apparently they were miffed because Artaud
wouldn't renounce theater as a bourgeois

But if you consider Artaud's theories and
subsequent theatrical career, this failure-to-renounce

the commercialism of theater is legit hilarious.

From 1926 to 1928, he co-ran the Theater Alfred
Jarry, producing work by August Strindberg.

In these years, he started to develop the
theories he would explain in

“The Theater and Its Double”—more about
that in a minute.

And he tried some of them out in his staging
of Percy Shelley's incest-heavy verse drama,

“The Cenci,” which did about as well with
critics and audiences as you would expect

an incest-heavy verse drama staged to actively
unhinge the spectator to do.

Then Artaud went to Mexico, took peyote, wrote
some memoirs, and detoxed from heroin (though

he would later retox ). He returned to France,
went to Ireland, and was brought back to France

... in a straitjacket, literally, because
he'd suffered a major psychotic break and

He was diagnosed with “incurable paranoid
delirium” and underwent electroshock treatment.

Eventually, he was released, and his friends
paid for him to stay in a private psychiatric

He continued writing, including poems and
a script for a radio broadcast that French

radio never aired, because it was strange
and rude.

Diagnosed with cancer, Artaud died in 1948.

Okay, so he may have had a dramatic life,
but why are we devoting a whole episode to

a guy who did a little acting, a little directing,
took peyote, and wrote a play or two before

confronting extreme mental, and eventually
physical illness?

Because his theories are still a huge influence.

Looking at the portrait we've painted over
the last number of episodes, you'll maybe

have noticed that modern theater had a nonstop
identity crisis about how to capture real

Sometimes theater is like, we're going to
make it as real as possible.

Those toilets onstage are going to flush!

The only way to capture real life is with
myth and magic, poetry and violence.

Everything on stage is a metaphor for toilets!

On the anti-realist side, Artaud is pretty
much king.

In 1938, Artaud published “The Theater and
Its Double.”

The book and its theories had a lot of important
influences: Surrealism, Symbolism, the works

that he helped produce at the Theater Alfred
Jarry, as well as the works of Jarry himself—all

But maybe the strongest influence was a performance
by a troupe of Balinese dancers that Artaud

had seen at the Paris International Colonial
Exposition in 1931.

The dance consisted, he wrote, “of everything
that occupies the stage, everything that can

be manifested and expressed materially on
a stage and that is addressed first of all

to the senses instead of being addressed primarily
to the mind as the language of words.”

Artaud was doing the thing a lot of Western
artists did where they saw what they wanted

In Artaud's case, he wanted a performance
style that transcended psychological realism,

which he called “psychological and human
stagnation.”

Inspired by the dance, he imagined a style
that would “restore the theater to its original

destiny,” a mix of dance, song, and pantomime,
“fused together in a perspective of hallucination

Artaud called this new form, the Theater of
Cruelty, a place

“in which violent physical images crush
and hypnotize the sensibility of the spectator

seized by the theatre as by a whirlwind of
higher forces.”

Now, Artaud wasn't talking about actual
physical violence—well, he wasn't only

talking about actual physical violence—but
rather a violent impulse that would rupture

ordinary perception and the boring normcore
way that most people conduct their day-to-day

Society, he thought, had become sick, complacent,
lulled by bourgeois illusion.

People needed ceremony and ritual—“a magic
exorcism”—to heal.

Artaud believed that the theater had learned
all the wrong lessons from Aristotle, with

his emphasis on plot and language, and his
meh attitude toward spectacle.

The Theater of Cruelty was going to be all
spectacle, all the time!

It would use music, dance, and certifiably
bananas lighting design that would wake up

the audience to how bizarre and violent real
life actually is.

He wanted a theater that would “leave an
ineffaceable scar.”

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安東-阿爾陶與殘酷的戲劇：速成班戲劇#43 (Antonin Artaud and the Theatre of Cruelty: Crash Course Theater #43)

perspective

mental

enormous

physical