![]() Artaud, like many other surrealists, was intrigued by the unusual, for the unusual seemed to him to be a pathway toward the ineffable which is more real (or surreal) than that which reason has dessicated. ![]() Many other exotic elements are present in the book: the Cabala with its mystical number three, Hindu systems of breath control, the principles of alchemy. Artaud constantly refers to the Balinese theater, and devotes an entire chapter to that subject, for he believes that the theater of Bali is the embodiment of his ideals. For Artraud does not entirely reject spoken language, but merely wishes to reduce its rMe in the theater, using it as a physical presence, rather than for its intellectual connotations: language becomes intonation, incantation. To fulfill the purpose of the theater ("to break through language in order to touch life") we must invent a language which is purely theatrical, using space and movement, and compounded of symbolic gestures (hieroglyphs), bodily rhythms, music, lights, sounds, cries, and even words. 'Lie Occidental theater, he claims, is only a theater of dialogue, a verbal theater, affd through dialogue it is not possible to touch the sources of life in the unconscious. ![]() Artaud's major thesis is that "the stage is a concrete physical place which asks to be filled, and to be given its own concrete language to speak." Therefore, he would do away with the author and the text, and replace them by a meffeur en scene (director) who is in complete control. The Theater and its Double, Artaud's most important writing devoted to the theater, is not a homogenous work, but rather a collection of essays and letters, enthusiastic, colorful, ardent, often fanatical, describing his ideas, or rather his ideals, for a radical revolution in the theater. The vitality of his ideas today, ten years after his death, has not diminished, and is confirmed not only by frequent mentions in the many French periodicals devoted to the theater, but by the direction the avant-garde theater has taken in the works of Beckett, lonesco, and particularly Adamov. The fact that Charles Dullin, Jean Vilar, Jean-Louis Barrault and Roger Blin were among those present to pay tribute to the poet and the man, is some indication of the r6le Artaud plays in the contemporary French theater. When in 1946 Antonin Artaud was released from a nine-year confinement in an insane asylum, the occasion was celebrated by a ceremony at the Theatre Sarah Bernhardt. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:īOOK REVIEWS THE THEATER AND ITS DOUBLE, by Antonin Artaud, translated by Mary Caroline Richards, Grove Press, Inc., New York, 1958, 159 pp.
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