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’.