“Theater of cruelty means a theater difficult and cruel for myself first of all. And, on the level of performance, it is not the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other's bodies, carving up our personal anatomies, or, like Assyrian emperors, sending parcels of human ears, noses, or neatly detached nostrils through the mail, but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has been created to teach us that first of all.”
Artaud was a French dramatist, poet, actor and philosopher, who was writing during the Surrealist movement. He believed that it was necessary to replace the 'bourgeois' classical theatre with his theatre of cruelty, a more gutteral and primitive experience- which he believed would liberate the subconscious and reveal us to ourselves.
The pieces would be based in ritual and fantasy, and were attempts to launch an attack of the spectators' subconscious in an attempt to release deep-rooted fears and anxieties that are normally suppressed- forcing people to view themselves and their true nature without the shield of civilisation.
Without even giving a damn about thetre and whether it is or isn't 'cruel', Artaud's writing is amazing. It's entirely graphic and sensual, and vivid.
Well worth a read- especially if you work in film or photography- it's really interesting drawing connections between this idea of the screen Artaud has created between theatre and real human actions and the screen of a video or an image. Particularly narrative based film and portraiture photography.
i would say, if you are at art school then it is worth reading
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