Word: artaud
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...that "we have lost all sense of ritual and ceremony-whether it be connected with Christmas, birthdays or funerals-but the words remain with us and old impulses stir in the marrow." Brook's deepest illumination about a holy theater comes from the French actor and critic Antonin Artaud, who conceived of the theater of cruelty as searingly holy, "working like the plague, by intoxication, by infection, by analogy, by magic; a theater in which the play, the event itself, stands in place of a text...
Peter Weiss' play Marat/ Sade was explicitly based on a cryptic plot suggestion by Artaud. As directed by Brook, it proved to be one of the most fecund works in the contemporary theater. The naked backside of Marat has turned the stage into a kind of auxiliary nudist camp. The tormented, writhing chorus of the inmates at Charenton popularized choreographic stage movement in straight plays, and the eerie sounds and gestures have become the language of antiword drama...
Ginn has perhaps made a mistake in directing such a cold play in emotional high-style, emphasizing spectacle with aluminized mylar sheets mirroring the audience, incense burning-away, and bits and pieces of Artaud and Grand Guignol. The set, grotesque caryatids awesomely conceived and executed by Sebastian Melmoth, nonetheless serves little intrinsic function in Ginn's concept, appearing only as so much lavish decoration surrounding the playing area. The costumes and lighting, however, work better, and are superb as only the Loeb can make them...
Behind all this are the theories of French Actor-Director Antonin Artaud, who held that the modern theater ought to involve and provoke gut reactions from audiences. The result, however, is a drama that is shamelessly alive from the waist down and shamefully dead from the neck up. Eloquence of speech is abandoned for voodoo gibber. The play is reduced to a trampoline for directorial acrobatics. Condemned to extemporaneous self-expression, the actors display no sense that they have mastered their craft. The audience participation destroys illusion without enhancing reality...
...small boy to death in the anguished presence of the child's mother. She decapitates a young goat, and gnaws on the animal's entrails with her lips dripping blood. All this is meant to confound, amaze, and dismay, to dramatize the central dictum of Antonin Artaud, the French pioneer of this type of theater who said: "Everything that acts is a cruelty...