Acting: Antonin Artaud/Universal language of Theatre Lesson 5

Tuesday 24^th March 2015

For our warm up we worked with greetings and with disgust. The greeting exercise was easier than showing disgust. I found it hard to show disgust because I felt I was doing the same action when I could have explored different ways of showing my disgust but I feel it was a good starting point because we haven’t explored negative greetings before.

We worked in groups and had to think of a ritual to do which was fun. We had to think of a ritual like a wedding or birthday party. In my group we did a wedding, and we had to perform it naturalistic first and then we had to do it as Artaud would have wanted. The techniques we used were exaggerating the emotions we felt and the actions we did. We also exaggerated the movements of walking down the aisle, doing really big steps. Doing this exercise it gave me a clear understanding of how Artaud wanted his actors and audience to start scavenging under the skin, feeling raw emotions.

One group did Christmas as their ritual. They started off sleeping, then woke up and sang chirstmas songs. Then they sat and looked at us as if we were a present that they were waiting for permission to unwrap. We started to feel self-conscious, as they watched us. It was quite off-putting. So I was starting to feel like an Artaud audience member. This piece was interesting because it made me feel happy but in an uncomfortable way, which is how Artauf wanted his audience to feel he didn’t want just happiness he wanted uneasiness as well.

We then worked in groups and looked at symbolism and surrealism. We asked ourselves does the visual add or detract from verbal linguistic words? I think it depends on what you’re trying to get across. Sometimes it’s nicer for people to imagine themselves, but in other ways Artaud’s work needs to also been seen to understand it.

Then we got into groups and we were told seven words and we had to think of what they symbolise to us. The words were: horizon, tree, water, seed, sea, flower, and cloud.

Horizon makes us think of sunsets, morning, destiny and tranquillity. Tree- purity, naturalism and stability. Water- lifesaver, refreshing, purity and nourishing. Seed- growth and the beginning. Sea- summer, happiness and soothing. Flower- colour, pleasant smell, positivity and death. Cloud, rain, imagination, dark, death and unstoppable.

We looked at these words and we found that actually they symbolise something different for al l of us. They are not taken literally, they can be metaphors. The first words we I think took literally and then we started to think about it more deeply and think of what we feel when we think of these words. Then we got given five words of emotion and we needed to come up with a still image of each words. The words were anger, sympathy, despair, boredom and loneliness. We came up with really good ideas for the words. For despair we looked down at the back of the wall and people interpreted it differently, some thought it was boredom or loneliness which was interesting because you could see different people’s reactions to the images and how they interpreted it.

Lastly we had to create a still image of short phrases. Which was difficult because the phrases were quite complex like ‘captivity followed by liberation’. 

Acting: Antonin Artaud/Universal language of Theatre Lesson 4

Thursday 17th March

Today we started with some warm up exercises that encouraged us to communicate without words because we are learning about Artaud’s Universal language. Then we talked about Artaud and how he witnessed a performance by Balinese dancers in 1931 in Paris, which inspired him to create his own theory of theatre which was Theatre of Cruelty.

Artaud thought that words were limiting and also he felt that all the subjects that other dramatists were talking about were limiting too, and didn’t mean anything to him. He wanted to break away from the realism theatre at the time and use symbolic language with images and gestures, sounds and movements. He wanted to make the subject matter universal so that if he took it to another country everyone would understand it.

Then we talked about significant moments in our lives and we had to observe each others body language like their facial expressions and their breathing and face and eyes. We had to do this instead of listening to their words. Then the storyteller had to tell the story again but without words, just using gesture and movement. This exercise helped us understand what Artaud wanted from his actors- he wanted them to be trained so that everyone can understand them.

We did another activity were 2 people would go out of the room and we would get a number relating to the level of the emotion Love. We also got a social status number which determined how we would behave. We would have an activity to do such as fishing and we would have to act it out how our social status was. The group had to guess our numbers of social standing and Love.  We had to try hard to show our emotion and social status through movement and gestures but no sounds.

In one activity we discussed how turning stories into movement and gibberish and gesture and having other people speak over another groups scene with dialogue, showed us how visual images have the power to get emotional responses from us even if we’re not saying anything.

All these tasks today helped us to understand Artaud’s attempt to create a theatre of cruelty that used symbolic, universal language to allow everyone to access the material.