ANTONIN ARTAUD AND THE THEATRE OF CRUELTY
Antonin Artaud is the father of the Theatre of Cruelty and Metaphysical Theatre. He developed his own theatrical theories and his conceptions and ideas about his theatre practice redefined completely the boundaries related to the approaches an audience can be conducted to, and the feelings they can experience.
TECHNIQUES
Theatre of cruelty mostly minimizes the narrative by accentuating screams, incoherent cries, and figurative gesticulations. The extremes of the human nature, particularly madness and distortion, are portrayed on stage to shock the audience and consequently evoke the necessary response. The idea of cruelty is not about blood and guts but about staging metaphysics. The technique is
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He went beyond the traditional dialogue-based theatre that everyone knows, since he wanted to create more intimate experience with the audience. For him the dialogue- something written and spoken- it does not belong to the scene, but to a book. Certainly, a scene is a physical and concrete place that requires to be occupied by speaking certain language. But that certain language, regardless the words, must satisfy all five human senses and those thoughts and feelings go beyond the domain of the spoken language. Those thoughts, which words cannot express, find their ideal expression nowhere but in the concrete and physical language of the scene. Artaud determined this physical and solid language, which will differentiate theatre from narrative, as a language that can fully occupy a scene. This physical language oriented to the senses has to foremost fulfill them with the sought sensations. Artaud saw this physical language as poetry in space that is going to be resolved in a domain that does not belong strictly to the words. This assumes multiple aspects to be used, especially those aspect of theatre that similarly correspond to expression and methods applicable for scenes for example music, dance, plastic, mime, gesticulation, lightning, decoration among others. Each of these theatre elements has it own poetry, intrinsic and powerful as it combines with the other methods of
...ition to costume, language and dialogue is what fixes the atmosphere and the action. In a manner very similar to Shakespeare, Calderón weaves description of the scene and of what is occurring into the main thrust of the play. In this sense, he is more than a poet, he is a dramatic craftsman who predominantly through his verse alone, creates a drama in its own right. All the clues to the plot and its themes lie in the text; the use of staging, costume, music and props can be used to enhance what lies in the script. What they give to the play is a fuller and more entertaining dramatic production. Thus, if used sensitively and intelligently by a director, these factors can increase the dramatic power of the work. The primary focus, however, remains the language, which relies on a high standard of acting in order to do justice to the subtleties of the play.
audience in his play. I will be analysing act one of the play to try
Throughout the piece, we see the use of audience as active participants to amplify the didactic message of the play. In the literature we see many instances where the author uses this cognitive distancing as a way to disrupt the stage illusion and make the audience active members of the play. Forcing the audience into an analytical standpoint as opposed to passively accepting whats happening in their conscious minds. This occurs time and time again in the fourth act of the play. The characters repeatedly break down the fourth wall and engage the audience with open participation. We see this in the quotation from the end of the fourth Act of the play:
Cruelty is callous indifference to or pleasure to causing pain and suffering. Cruelty can be measured in different ways from taking a child's toy or bombing another country, but is there any reason why people commit these cruel acts. In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road a catastrophic event has happened causing an apocalypse where many people have died, animals are extinct, and the soil is now infertile. This causes the humans to perform cruel acts in order to survive, but are these acts really cruel? People in The Road execute atrocious acts of cruelty in the aspiration of surviving, but do people’s morals affect their acts of cruelty.
It is difficult to imagine a play which is completely successful in portraying drama as Bertolt Brecht envisioned it to be. For many years before and since Brecht proposed his theory of “Epic Theatre”, writers, directors and actors have been focused on the vitality of entertaining the audience, and creating characters with which the spectator can empathize. ‘Epic Theatre’ believes that the actor-spectator relationship should be one of distinct separation, and that the spectator should learn from the actor rather than relate to him. Two contemporary plays that have been written in the last thirty years which examine and work with Brechtian ideals are ‘Fanshen’ by David Hare, and ‘The Laramie Project’ by Moises Kaufman. The question to be examined is whether either of these two plays are entirely successful in achieving what was later called, ‘The Alienation Effect”.
""The Art of Cruelty"" The New York Times Book Review, 31 July 2011. Web. 27 Nov. 2011.
Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor, started off as an ordinary teenager, however, went on to face cruelty that no one should have to experience. He had friends, went to school, and even studied the Kabbalah in his free time. Until one day, his hometown, Sighet, was invaded by German soldiers. After the arrival of German soldiers, Jews like Wiesel were sent to the ghettos, and they were then put on trains to a variety of different concentration camps. Wiesel constantly went back and forth through numerous concentration camps— five to be exact. After being separated from his mother and sister, the only person Wiesel had left was his father. Wiesel expresses the feeling as, "My father's presence was the only thing that stopped me. He was running next to me, out of breath, out of strength, desperate.
World War One had an inevitable effect on the lives of many young and naive individuals, including Wilfred Owen, who, like many others, joined the military effort with the belief that he would find honour, wealth and adventure. The optimism which Owen initially had toward the conflict is emphasised in the excerpt, in which he is described as “a young poet…with a romantic view of war common among the young” (narrator), a view which rapidly changed upon reaching the front. Owen presents responders with an overwhelming exploration of human cruelty on other individuals through acts of war and the clash of individual’s opposed feelings influenced by the experiences of human cruelty. This is presented through the horrific nature of war which the
Women are beaten, and it is culturally acceptable. Like routine, women are beaten in Afghanistan almost every day. When a person purposely inflicts sufferings on others with no feelings of concern, like the women of Afghanistan, he is cruel. Cruelty can manifest from anger, irritation, or defeat and is driven by self-interest. An idea that is explored in many works of literature, cruelty also appears in Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns in the relationship between a husband and wife. In their case, the husband uses cruelties in the form of aggression are to force his wife to submit. In A Thousand Splendid Suns, Hosseini’s use of cruelty elucidates the values of both Rasheed and Mariam as well as essential ideas about the nature of
of the audience. One of his main aims in the play was to present the
Literature has existed since the establishment of written language as an attempt to comprehend one’s reality and surroundings, rendering it an intrinsic part of the human experience. As literature developed as an art form, writers would reference and draw from previous works and authors as a means of integrating the rich history of this medium into their works. The beauty of Neumeier's ballets is that he has taken part in this phenomenon of drawing from and paying homage to previous works whilst using the medium of ballet as a vehicle for expression. Neumeier recognizes the beauty in being able to convey and evoke emotions without the use of words and language; it is this recognition that drives my passion for creating visual works of art such as silent films and sculpted ceramics pieces. With this recognition, Neumeier is pushing the boundary by using written language present in literature and translating it into the universal language that takes place in artistic expression, thus revolutionizing his field and entering new
This play shows the importance of the staging, gestures, and props making the atmosphere of a play. Without the development of these things through directions from the author, the whole point of the play will be missed. The dialog in this play only complements the unspoken. Words definitely do not tell the whole story.
In the first chapter Esslin deems all common definitions of drama as lacking and insufficient since they overlook dramatic genres that are not staged. He thus draws heavily on those who regard live theatre as the only true form of drama. And yet Esslin does not state his own definition. He instead declares that drama should not have ...
In this paper, I will be focusing briefly on my knowledge and understanding of the concept of Applied theatre and one of its theatre form, which is Theatre in Education. The term Applied Theatre is a broad range of dramatic activity carried out by a crowd of diverse bodies and groups.
Theatre as we know it now was born more than two thousand years ago and has gone through many streams until it reached the current modernity. Among these streams is the avant-garde theatre. This theatre achieved a break in the traditional theatre and became the forefront of a new experimental theatre. Therefore it is necessary to ask how this theatre started, what impact it had on society and if this type of theatre is still common in our modern era.