Acting: Antonin Artaud/Universal language of Theatre Lesson 2

Tuesday 10^th February 2015

This week lesson we carried on looking at antonin artaud we came up with our own work ups for the class in groups using the techniques we learnt last week. We follow on with coming up with a short piece from nursery rhymes where we couldn’t use words. Next we talked about theatre of cruelty.

We came up with our own warm ups in groups to use in a class warm up, using Artaud’s techniques. We did basic movements but pushed ourselves to keep going to the point where we couldn’t do anymore. My group had two circles of people and one person started with showing an emotion and the next person in the circle would build on that and it would grow and grow round the circle. Another group had the idea of being a frozen strawberry in a blender, so we had to spin round and get faster and faster and make noises, not using words. Another exercise was one person was a fish and the other was a fisherman and the fish had to resist the fisherman and the fisherman had to keep trying to catch the fish. The fish had to be pulled by one part of their body.

These warm ups were fun to create because we could do anything that would bring our animal side out, which follows what we learnt about Artaud last week. He wanted to bring out people’s raw emotions and go against what society thinks is normal behaviour. So these exercises needed to engage with that raw emotion, ready for the main task.

For the second task we had to pick a nursery rhyme and come up with a piece without using words and using audience involvement, to depict the nursery rhyme. We chose Humpty Dumpty because we thought we could use the idea of the actors being the horses and the audience could be the kings men, so when Humpty Dumpty fell over, the ‘horses’ could push the audience around Humpty Dumpty and then move through the legs of the audience members and lay over Humpty Dumpty to show he is no more. This task was another exciting exercise to do because we could think of crazy things to do to depict this nursery rhyme. One of our feedback comments to help us improve on it, was that we could be more forceful with the audience to push them onto Humpty Dumpty and we could have been more grotesque to show the Humpty Dumpty story.

Next we talked about Theatre of Cruelty, and the 5 main elements that are incorporated into it. The first element is to push extremes and make the audience feel uncomfortable and the actors need to push their extremes and be beyond normal, but not melodramatic. The second element is a universal language that everyone can understand and engage with , so if a play is taken to any country, the audience can feel the same raw emotions and understand what is happening. The third element is the physicalisation, going to the extreme, physical gesture takes priority over verbal language. The fourth element is concrete language of symbols, for example using breathing as a symbol for an emotion that can be easily recognised. The fifth element is the audience/performance relationship, breaking the fourth wall. The idea Artaud had was to have the audience in spinning chairs so the audience could watch a show all around them. But this never happened because he was considered to be mad, and most of his ideas that he wanted to implement did not happen.

In conclusion, I found that I understood a great deal of his ideas and why he had his ideas. I found it quite exciting to know we are devising a short piece about nightmares, because everyone can relate to having nightmares and it’ll be a good way to show the grotesqueness of Artaud’s ideas and push ourselves to the extreme. Even though Artaud was considered mad and his ideas ignored back then, nowadays it is possible to try out his ideas and push theatre to the limits.