Acting: Antonin Artaud/Universal language of Theatre Lesson 1

Tuesday 3th February 2015

This week in acting, we started looking at the French practitioner Antonin Artaud. Artaud did not feel that the naturalistic staging and acting style of the time (early 1900s) reflected life. Stanislavsky style of naturalism was supposed to be a reflection of life on stage, in a natural way, but Artaud disagreed and felt that the pain he felt in his life was not reflected on stage. He felt that theatre should reflect the pain and emotions that real people feel in a surrealist way so he came up with a “Theatre of Cruelty”. He wanted his Theatre of cruelty to show the violent and physical determination to destroy the false reality.

In class we looked at the Universal Language of Theatre and how to create an emotion that everyone can understand without text. This is because Artaud wanted to get rid of theatre’s reliance on text and instead used movement and gesture to show emotions and ideas on stage. In class we did a breathing exercise where we had to breathe in and out using different emotions such as happy or anxious or angry. When one person breathed with an emotion, the rest of the class had to watch and then feel the same emotion and do the breathing style themselves.

We also did an exercise where we showed happiness, love and then adoration towards each other but without sound. We also stood in pairs and we could make sound but not words to express anger. This was about Artaud’s work on emphasizing movement and gestures and sounds, rather than following text or script.

Another exercise we did was to line up 7 people and start with one person at the end showing a low sense of anxious emotion and then as it went up the line the emotion got bigger and bigger until the last person was showing the highest level of anxious. We had to build on the level of the person before and increase the level as it went from 1-7.

Our work in class on expressing emotion through movement and sound and gesture was part of Antonin Artaud’s theatre of cruelty where he wanted to get rid of naturalism style of acting and instead show not everyday life on stage but over exaggerated life and emotions on stage.

I felt it was really interesting learning about Artaud. It was quite overwhelming to hear about the work he did and how one lady even gave birth during a show. I can see why he created theatre of cruelty because naturalism is quite a safe version of life on stage but Artaud wanted to show danger because there’s danger in real life. In terms of universal language I found it really interesting how as a company we could all show one emotion once we got over the fact that we looked ridiculous. I found it amazing and quite an emotional release.

I think my strengths were that I went for it and didn’t hold back but my weakness was that I didn’t understand the difference between symbolic imagery and literal imagery.

So in conclusion from this lesson I found it was a completely different style from Brecht which was interesting to compare in my head. It was good to learn about different practitioners and their work.