Artaud

Artaud

Total theatre:

• Transforming existing expectations of theatrical experiences
• Thought theatre practitioners should stop being bound to texts and should try to discover and articulate their own language.
• He liked: gestures, heavy breathing, humans making sounds which aren’t human like, rituals, synchronised movement and processions.
  
  

Theatre of cruelty:

·      Artaud believed that the theatre should represent reality and therefore affect the audiences as much as possible. He used a mixture of strong and disturbing forms of light, sounds, ect.

·      Violent, physical determination to shatter false reality

·      Kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid

Exercise 1: We lied down and the lights were turned off and we were asked to shut our eyes and listen to the music.

Exercise 2: We created 3 freeze frames individually showing how we felt when listening to the music. We then created transformations from move to move, so it flowed. We found a partner and linked our moves together, using our voice as an extra affect, for example, screaming, laughing or stomping on the floor.

Exercise 3: We created a ritual from scratch in groups and chose one member of the rest of the class as our person to perform the ritual to.

From this workshop:

• I found that by creating a ritual type performance you can express many key ideas through the 
• body, voice and projection.
• The voice and body are easy ways of communicating ideas.
• An abstract idea that is interesting and different when devising.