The Use of the Body in Artaud's Theatre

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The aim of this paper is to explore Antonin Artaud's use of the body in performance, as the "site of all human transformation, liberation and independence" (Barber, p72).
Artaud's immense influence on theatre practice continues to generate interest and debate. Calling for an end to rational drama, his iconoclastic work pushes the boundaries of critical thinking by means of a continuous flow of construction and destruction.
In Antonin Artaud: Man of Vision, Bettina Knapp offered an explanation of Artaud's popularity long after his death: “In his time, he was a man alienated from his society, divided within himself, a victim of inner and outer forces beyond his control. … The tidal force of his imagination and the urgency of his therapeutic quest were disregarded and cast aside as the ravings of a madman. … Modern man can respond to Artaud now because they share so many psychological similarities and affinities.” In the same book she also states that Artaud was unable to adapt to society and its schemes and rules. He built an entire world of artistic production around his sickness and fed this world with madness and disease in order to cure himself through his art. Theatre became his medication and relief in a time when he was completely alienated from the reality surrounding him. For Artaud all there is is the body in itself: "The body is the body, alone it stands" (McKeon,1977, p59). In his Theatre of cruelty he advocates that the organs are enemies of the body and reality is yet to be invented because the organs of the body are not set yet. (Sontag, 1976)
Due to its soft nature, the body is exposed to constant insult and assault, pain and wounds. In his Radio play “To Have Done With The Judgement Of God” he explains that what ent...

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....3, 1977.

Antonin Artaud, Theatre of Cruelty in: Selected Writings. ed. Susan Sontag, trans. Helen Weaver, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Oeuvres completes, 1976.

Antonin Artaud, To Have Done With The Judgement of God in: Selected Writings. ed. Susan Sontag, 1976; online copy on: http://www.megabaud.fi/~karttu/tekstit/artaud.htm (as of Dec 2003)

Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: towards a corporeal feminism, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1994.

Jacques Derrida, The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation. trans. Alan Bass, University of Chicago Press, 1978.

Antonin Artaud, The theatre and his double. trans. Mary Caroline Richards, Grove Press, New York, 1958.

George E. Wellwarth, Drama Survey, Vol. 2, February 1963, pp. 276-287.

David Williams, a Theatrical Casebook. ed. Peter Brook, foreword by Irving Wardle, Methuen, London 1988.

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