Theatre of Cruelty

For the short story, see Theatre of Cruelty (Discworld).

The Theatre of Cruelty (French: Théâtre de la Cruauté) is a surrealist form of theatre theorised by Antonin Artaud in his book The Theatre and its Double. "Without an element of cruelty at the root of every spectacle," he writes, "the theatre is not possible. In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds." By "cruelty," Artaud referred not to sadism or causing pain, but rather a violent, austere, physical determination to shatter the false reality that, he wrote, "lies like a shroud over our perceptions."

Theory

Antonin Artaud spoke of cruelty (French: cruauté) not in the sense of violent way, but rather the cruelty it takes for actors to show an audience a truth that they do not wish to see. Made up of a unique language that lay halfway between thought and gesture. Artaud thought that society and the world of theatre had become an empty shell. In the Theatre of Cruelty, he was trying to revolutionize theatre themselves that had been lost for most people.

Stephen Barber explains that "the Theatre of Cruelty has often been called an impossible theatre--vital for the purity of inspiration which it generated, but hopelessly vague and metaphorical in its concrete detail." This impossibility has not prevented others from articulating a version of his principles as the basis for explorations of their own. "Though many of those theatre-artists proclaimed an Artaudian lineage (Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Brook, Richard Schechner among them)," Susie Tharu argues, "the Artaud they invoke is marked by a commitment as ahistorical and transcendent as their own." There is, she suggests, another 'Artaud' and "the tradition he was midwife to."

The German dramatist Heiner Müller, who along with Caryl Churchill and Pina Bausch has been identified as having produced a fusion or critical dialogue between Artaudian and Brechtian performance in their work (which is one characteristic of the postmodern in theatre), argues that we have yet to feel or to appreciate fully Artaud's contribution to theatrical culture; his ideas are, Müller implies, 'untimely' (in Nietzsche's sense):

"ARTAUD THE LANGUAGE OF CRUELTY Writing from the experience that masterpieces are accomplices of power. Thought at the end of the Enlightenment, which began with the death of God; the Enlightenment is the coffin in which he is buried, rotting with the corpse. Life is locked up in this coffin. THOUGHT IS AMONG THE GREATEST PLEASURES OF THE HUMAN RACE Brecht has Galilei say, before he is shown the instruments. The lightning that split Artaud's consciousness was Nietzsche's experience, it could be the last. The emergency is Artaud. He tore literature away from the police, theater away from medicine. Under the sun of torture, which shines equally on all the continents of this planet, his texts blossom. Read on the ruins of Europe, they will be classics."

Empirics

Robert Walker uses the Theater of Cruelty as a conceptual heuristic to explicate agrarian struggle and deforestation in the Amazon Basin. So deployed, the “Theater of Cruelty” provides a structure for cruel performance, whereby violent land conflict and forest destruction compose a predictable tragedy of theatrical events. The Amazonian Theater involves a staging of such physical enormity that it is tantamount to life. Discourse becomes scripting for the bodies of the poor who engage a nemesis, the rancher, in an existential antagonism of historical and geographic reach.

See also

• Theatre of the Absurd
• Living Theatre
• Panic Movement

References

• Antonin Artaud, Mary C. Richard (translator), The Theater and Its Double. Grove Press, 1994. ISBN 0-8021-5030-6
• Barber, Stephen. 1993. Antonin Artaud: Blows and Bombs. London: Faber. ISBN 0-571-17252-0.
• Howe Kritzer, Amelia. 1991. The Plays of Caryl Churchill: Theatre of Empowerment. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 0-333-52248-6.
• Jamieson, Lee. 2007. Antonin Artaud: From Theory to Practice London: Greenwich Exchange. ISBN 978-1-871551-98-3.
• Müller, Heiner. 1977. "Artaud The Language of Cruelty." In Germania. Trans. Bernard Schütze and Caroline Schütze. Ed. Sylvère Lotringer. Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Ser. New York: Semiotext(e), 1990. ISBN 0-936756-63-2. p. 175.
• Price, David W. 1990. "The Politics of the Body: Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater". Theatre Journal 42.3 (Oct). 322-331.
• Tharu, Susie J. 1984. The Sense of Performance: Post-Artaud Theatre. New Delhi : Arnold-Heinemann. ISBN 0-391-03050-7.
• Walker, Robert. 2011. The Amazonian Theater of Cruelty. The Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Volume 101: 1156-1170.