Word: artaud
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...more interesting approach can be found in some of theater's most famous theoretical literature. French playwright and critic Antonin Artaud argues in his seminal work The Theater and its Double that the theater has too long been dominated by text, the director has too long been slave to the author. Theater is not literature, he argues, and it should not pay undue homage to the authority of written words. Theater is a unique set of experiences based fundamentally in space rather than letters. As such it has a visual language all its own, a language which cannot be notated...
...problem with Artaud's argumentation lies in his decision to ignore the playwright's role as storyteller. Regardless of whether or not one wishes to tell a story with a given piece of theater, it is impossible to put anything on a stage without telling a story on some level. Narrative, in its most basic form, is simply a direct and inevitable byproduct of time. And unlike artforms such as painting or sculpture which work only with space, both space and time are the fundamental media of theater. Artaud condemns the overemphasis on dialogue in modern theater as a means...
...paper, and if their realm of authority extends only so far as spoken dialogue, then they will have no choice but to tell entire stories through dialogue alone. On top of this a director will then add his or her own visual story in the visual language that Artaud holds so dear. Combining these distinct layers of narrative-one conceived in words by a person at a desk, the other conceived in images by a person in a theater-into a single performance has the potential to be beautiful should the two layers work in harmony with one another...
There are times when you feel that if you hear the words elitist or subvert just once more, you'll barf. So when MOMA's Margit Rowell, who in the past has curated some intelligent shows on Constructivist sculpture, Brancusi, Antonin Artaud's drawings and other topics, affirms that Polke's vernacular has "regenerate[d] the language and meaning of Western artistic experience," and suggests that he is the Hieronymus Bosch of our day, you sigh. Polke has never shown a smidgen of the aesthetic intensity, the absorption in religious and moral experience or the staggering completeness of Bosch...
Making subtle references to such theater big-wigs as Antonin Artaud and David Merrick throughout, Levin, like Altman, adds a certain element of inside humor to his work. Picking up on and, more importantly, understanding Levin's allusions allows audience members a most gratifying sense of satisfaction. This "I know something you don't know" component somehow compensates for the feeling that Levin otherwise seems to be out to trick...