Acting: Antonin Artaud/Universal language of Theatre Lesson 3

Tuesday 17^th February

We started with a warm up where we had to imagine we were giving birth to an alien, and then looking under a door at someone on the toilet, and we had to be a vegetable in a blender. We also had to be a caveman going on date. I found it enjoyable and relaxing to do weird stuff.

We went into our groups from last week and created our theatre of cruelty piece about nightmares. We only had 10 minutes, so it would have been nice to have longer time to develop our ideas. The piece we came up with was good because it broke the wall between actor and audience, the fourth wall. We started the audience outside the room and walked them in a line, with eyes closed, we then lined them up in the room and made horrible noises in their ears and breathed down their necks. This brought out the audiences raw emotions because we made them feel scared and vulnerable with their eyes closed. This relates to Artaud’s theatre of cruelty because we used noises instead of text, and we made the audience feel uncomfortable.

We then let the audience open their eyes, and we crawled through their legs in a grotesque way. Then one of us was the subconscious and another person was the conscience. The conscience was sleeping and peaceful, and the subconscious would try to wake conscience up. The two grotesque monsters from before would pull the conscience away. We would try to get conscience to turn into a monster too to show that nightmares can change you as a person.

This exercise links to Artaud’s techniques because we got the audience to feel scared and terrified and uncomfortable. We used grotesque noises to show nightmares that anyone can have, so the audience experienced fear together as they had a collective nightmare.

I really liked this exercise and had fun with it because you could really use your imagination to show nightmares that anyone can relate to. The warm up exercise was enjoyable because people had such different responses to how to give birth to an alien. It was interesting to see the different performances about nightmares to see different groups responses.