Antonin
Artaud, The Theatre and its Double (1938)
A Presentation for the Performance Theory Seminar
I. Texts and Contexts.
- Stanislavski; Brecht; Artaud; Craig
- Grotowski; Brook; Schechner
- Brecht; Beckett; Genet; (popular, political, community, theatre for development)
- Claude Schumacher, ed. (1989). Artaud on Theatre.
- Susie J. Tharu. (1984). The Sense of Performance: Post-Artaud Theatre.
- Jonas Barish. (1981). The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice.
- Raymond Williams. (1989). The Politics of Modernism.
- Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. (1972). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Though many of those theatre-artists proclaimed an Artaudian lineage (Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Brook, Richard Schechner among them) the Artaud they invoke is marked by a commitment as ahistorical and transcendent as their own. The aim of this study, then is to search out the other Artaud and the tradition he was midwife to.
It is
from these wholly alternative emphases that we can define, within the vigorous
and overlapping experimental drama and theatre, the eventually distinguishable
forms of "subjective" and "social" Expressionism. New names were eventually
found for these avant-garde methods, mainly because of these differences and
complications of purpose. What was still there in common was the refusal of
reproduction: in staging, in language, in character presentation. But one
tendency was moving towards that new form of bourgeois dissidence which, in
its very emphasis on subjectivity, rejected the discourse of any public world
as irrelevant to its deeper concerns. Sexual liberation, the emancipation
of dream and fantasy, a new interest in madness as an alternative to repressive
sanity, a rejection of ordered language as a form of concealed but routine
domination: these were now seen, in this tendency, which culminated in Surrealism
and Artaud's "Theatre of Cruelty", as the real dissidence, breaking alike
from bourgeois society and from the forms of opposition to it which had been
generated within its terms. On the other hand, the opposite, more political
tendency offered to renounce the bourgeoisie altogether: to move from dissidence
to conscious affiliation with the working class: in early Soviet theatre,
Piscator and Toller, eventually Brecht.
The concept
of "political theatre", for obvious reasons, is associated mainly with the
second tendency. But it would be wrong to overlook altogether the political
effects of the first tendency which, with an increasing emphasis on themes
of madness, disruptive violence and liberating sexuality, came through to
dominate Western avant-garde theatre in a later period, especially after 1950.
One element in this domination has been what can been seen as a failure in
that most extreme political tendency--the Bolshevik variant of Socialism--which
had attached itself to the ideas and projects of the working class. Postwar
history, and especially the Soviet experience, has made the brave early affiliations
evidently problematic. Yet, since both tendencies are still active, and in
changing proportions, it is important to identify them, within the generalities
of avant-garde theatre, at the point where they most clearly began to diverge.
My dear friend,
I believe
I have found a suitable title for my book.
It will
be:
THE THEATRE AND ITS DOUBLE
for if theatre doubles life, life doubles true theatre, but
it has nothing to do with Oscar Wilde's ideas on Art. This title will comply
with all the doubles of the theatre which I thought I'd found for so many
years: metaphysics, plague, cruelty,
the pool
of energies which constitute Myths, which man no longer embodies, is embodied
by the theatre. By this double I mean the great magical agent of which the
theatre, through its forms, is only the figuration on its way to becoming
the transfiguration.
It is
on the stage that the union of thought, gesture and action is reconstructed.
And the double of the Theatre is reality untouched by the men of today.
25th January, 1936.
(Schumacher 1989, 87-88)
Artaud's idea of "cruelty": a mode in which one is shocked bodily into an awareness of the undomesticated or the uncanny. It is as if, suddenly, in the midst of reassuringly familiar forms, a space opens up, lit by a strange light.
The cutting edge of this critique can still move towards forms of more general revolt (as in some examples of feminist theatre); but more characteristically it settles in the attempted breakthrough to authentic individual experience from below this standardized consciousness, or in the very demonstration of the impossibility of such a break. There is then a movement from presenting the bourgeois world as at once domineering and grotesque to an insistence--in certain forms a satisfied and even happy insistence--that changing this is impossible, is indeed literally inconceivable while the dominant consciousness bears down. This takes a special form in theatre in what is offered as a rejection of language. If words "arrest and paralyse thought" it may be possible, as Artaud hoped, to substitute "for the spoken language a different language of nature, whose expressive possibilities will be equal to verbal language": a theatre of visual movement and of the body. In such ways, the fixed forms of representation can be perpetually broken, not by establishing new forms but by showing their persistent pressure and tyranny. One main emphasis within this is to render all activity and speech as illusory and to value theatre, in its frankly illusory character, as the privileged bearer of this universal truth.
The spectator, a detached observer no longer, would be engulfed by the spectacle, bombarded by colors, lights, and sounds. About him would swirl huge masks, giant mannekins, hieroglyphics, objects "of strange proportions," and creatures "in ritual costumes." All this so as to subvert his judgment and unseat his normal sense of himself, send seismic shock waves coursing through him, to teach him his helplessness in the face of the powers that rule human life. Though Artaud's doctrine of helplessness stands at the opposite pole from the message of freedom which Rousseau wished to promote through his civic festivals--though indeed it recalls the antique doctrine of fate which Rousseau regarded as one of the most odious features of classical drama, and made him long to abolish it--nevertheless Artaud shares with Rousseau, as also with the backward-looking Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy, a vision of theater as a mass event in which impersonation disappears, fiction vanishes, and the spectator loses himself amid the swarm of excitants that assail him. With the actor discarded as a representative of humanity, or swallowed up in his distorting masks and exaggerating costumes, with the division annulled between stage and spectator, theater becomes a participatory rite meant to arouse and overwhelm the spectator with intense states of consciousness. Whether in joy or panic, he is made to merge directly with his fellows, to submerge his consciousness in theirs, to experience reality unmediated, instead of seeing it transferred or delegated to others.
It demands that we consider the phenomenon, not for the end it achieves in the world, (its utility or function) but as a sign that reveals, through its transformation of the act into the spectacular, the sense or the lived meaning of that gesture. This sense, Artaud never allows us to ignore, is a sense that must arise from a bodily being in the world. The theatre is not concerned with the total clarity that comes from a possession of the object any more than it is with imitation, he insists. Its fascination is carnal; complete.
Such
theatre, however, does not merely "frame" an event from real life turning
it into spectacle by the very act . . . . What the theatre does, rather, is
to aid this transformation, by locating in the outer event the sources that
speak to the body and swelling these out or taking them to their limit . .
. . One works by creating "temptations, vacuums" around ideas and things.
Vacuums that draw the body towards the object which then reveals itself. .
. .
To create
a space thus, at a pre-thematic, corporeal level, is not merely to present
something, but also to take us back to the very origins of these struggles,
where all the "powers of nature are newly rediscovered."
[A]nd I will devote myself from now on
exclusively
to the theatre
as I conceive it,
a theatre of blood,
a theatre which at each performance will stir
something
in the body
of the performer as well as the spectator of the play,
but actually,
the actor does not perform,
he creates.
Theatre is in reality the genesis of creation:
It will come about.
Tuesday 24th February, 1948.
(Schumacher 1989, 200)
© Terence Smith, 1997.
Performance Theory.
15th October, 1997.