Antonin Artaud

Short Biography

Artaud, Antonin [1896-1948]

French theatre director. An early member of the surrealist movement in Paris. He was well-known between the wars as an actor, playwright and essayist of the avant-garde theatre, and he is one of the formative influences on the modern European theatre. Although his play, Les Cenci (The Cenci, 1935), was a failure, his concept of the Theatre of Cruelty, his label for a theater that would assault the representational dynamics of traditional theater and break the boundaries between actor and audience, stage and spectacle. Theatre of Cruelty intended to release feelings usually repressed in the unconcious, has been an important influence on modern dramatists such as Camus and Genet and on directors such as Grotowski, Beck, etc. Declared insane 1936, Artaud was confined in an asylum for most of the remainder of his life..
 

Antonin Artaud quotes

Quotes on theatre and acting

• «I propose then a theater in which violent physical images crush and hypnotize the sensibility of the spectator seized by the theater as by a whirlwind of high forces. A theater which, abandoning psychology, recounts the extraordinary, stages natural conflicts, natural and subtle forces, and presents itself first of all as an exceptional power of redirection. A theater that induces trance, as the dances of Dervishes induce trance, and that addresses itself to the organism by precise instruments, by the same means as those of certain tribal music cures which we admire an records but are incapable of originating among ourselves». (A. Artaud, The Theatre and its double, 1938)
• «No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell».
• «The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything -- gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness -- rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations. To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre».
• «Theater of cruelty means a theater difficult and cruel for myself first of all. And, on the level of performance, it is not the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other's bodies, carving up our personal anatomies, or, like Assyrian emperors, sending parcels of human ears, noses, or neatly detached nostrils through the mail, but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has been created to teach us that first of all».
• «Never tire yourself more than necessary, even if you have to found a culture on the fatigue of your bones»