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.