Antonin Artaud Overview

"I salute Antonin Artaud," wrote Andre Breton, "for his passionate, heroic negation of everything that causes us to be dead while alive." The French actor, director, poet, and theorist was an enraged man of arguable genius; nevertheless, his writings are seminal... [more]

"I salute Antonin Artaud," wrote Andre Breton, "for his passionate, heroic negation of everything that causes us to be dead while alive." The French actor, director, poet, and theorist was an enraged man of arguable genius; nevertheless, his writings are seminal influences on experimental theater. Artaud repudiated all literature written to be performed, all Western traditions, and civilization itself. For Artaud, civilization only corrupted the essence of humanity: humankind was ferocious, hungry, and afraid, and all cultural conventions deluded us into thinking otherwise. Although he began his career in theater as an actor, his greatest contribution was his collected essays, "Theater and its Double" (1938), in which he posited a "theater of cruelty." He saw the theater as a catalyst that could free the unconscious and force humanity to view itself in all its primitiveness. The Theater of Cruelty stripped participants of the artificial conventions of society, dispensing with language in favor of nonverbal codes like symbolic gesture, movement, sound, and rhythm. By destroying all forms of language and social conventions, Artaud sought to make actors and audiences into "victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames." His thesis behind this radical theory was that "the world is hungry and not concerned with culture, and...the attempt to orient toward culture thoughts turned only toward hunger is a purely artificial expedient." For him, the only value of theater was "its excruciating, magical relation to reality and danger." Other passages from his manifesto seem like early explications of Deconstructionist theory: "If confusion is the sign of the times, I see at the root of this confusion a rupture between things and words, between things and the ideas and signs that are their representation." Tragically, this raving genius spent nine years in mental asylums, and died just two years after his release. His influence can be seen in the works of Genet and Gide and his theories inspired experiments such as audience participation in the Happenings of the 1960s. [show less]