Theatre of Cruelty

The Theater of Cruelty can refer to the avant-garde proposal of a new form of theater, advanced by French artist Antonin Artaud during the decade of 1930, as well as the short-lived company he founded under the same name, and which put on a sole production in 1935. The primary use of the term, however, is associated with Artaud’s conceptual theater that rejects dependence on texts to structure dialog and logical stories. Instead, the Theater of Cruelty attempts to break down that logic by focusing on the immediacy of acting and the way in which the audience experiences it, exchanging adherence to the text for gestural intensity and the transgression of the limits between actor, spectator, and stage. These ideas have influenced the course of modern and contemporary theater, having been adopted by companies like The Living Theater. It has also influenced interpretations of cinema works such as those of filmmaker Jean Rouch.

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Brief History

Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) was a poet and visual artist that became a part of the surrealist avant-garde movement in the early 1920s, distancing himself from it after 1926. He was very interested in cinema and theater, and came to participate as writer or actor in various film productions of the time, such as Germaine Dulac’s The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928) and Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927). He simultaneously worked in theater, founding the Alfred Jarry Theater Company in 1927 (which lasted until 1929 and was named for playwright Alfred Jarry). He was profoundly interested in Balinese dance performances by 1931, the year in which he wrote the first manifesto of the Theater of Cruelty. In it, he compounded ideas he had developed over the course of his experience with surrealism, esotericism, film, theater, and Southeast Asian performances, turning them into an avant-garde that attacked the theatrical art for its traditional attachment to the linguistic value of the text; in other words, for positioning theater as another form of literature, when, according to him, it could be a unique language that bridged gesture and thought.

Artaud wrote other texts expanding on these ideas, such as "The Theater and the Plague," "Theater and Cruelty," and "The Alchemical Theater," while producing a second and final manifesto for the Theater of Cruelty in 1933. Along with several letters, manifestos, and other theoretical writings, all of them were published in a single volume in 1938 under the title The Theater and Its Double. While most of the ideas contained in the book would become much more important and influential over the course of the following decades, long after Artaud’s death in 1948, he did manage to put them into practice with a single, unsuccessful production in 1935. It was a staging of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Gothic verse drama The Cenci, which Artaud modified extensively for performance. While the adaptation was well-received among critics and fellow artists, it did not last more than a few weeks, and the rest of the projects spanned by the ideas behind the Theater of Cruelty, such as a play by Artaud entitled The Conquest of Mexico, were never produced.

Overview

The Theater of Cruelty constitutes an avant-garde assault on the dramatic arts at large, and in origin belongs to the context of the vanguard art movements of the first half of the twentieth century. It shares with them the fundamental concept of a division between art and life, in the sense that they conceived of art as a traditional baggage that had no real impact on everyday existence. By attacking this division (well represented, for example, in the difference between actor, audience, and stage), the avant-garde sought to revitalize artistic practice by tearing down conventions, and the Theater of Cruelty is an instance of this attempt.

The key of this particular attack resides in the term "cruelty," which Artaud uses mainly to refer to the shattering of modes of spectatorship that rely entirely on the distance kept between art and audience. It is not a physical form of cruelty, but a spiritual one. By adapting classics and transgressive plays such as John Ford’s ‘Tis a Pity She’s a Whore to a modern sensibility, the Theater of Cruelty seeks to disrupt conventional expression, rationally understood by the audience as something happening elsewhere, in order to sweep said audience up into the intensity of performance and make it suffer the emotional transformations enacted in drama. As a point of departure for overcoming these basic divisions, Artaud compares the theater to the plague as a major, vital upheaval that turns the world upside down in great anarchic leaps of life and death, leveling populations as they shun some masks and acquire others. One of the images he uses, for example, is that of the hero of the city who, to save it, must raze the place to the ground. Theater, according to Artaud, should present to everyone involved with it risks of living, like the shudder of the plague.

Thus, this form of drama requires actors to live out expressions as bodily shock, setting aside texts and learned mannerisms so as to reject the spectators’ logical approach to theater as either literature or entertainment, attempting to infect them with the intensity of the act. It also changes the use of theatrical resources, such as lighting and music, leaving behind a setup that traditionally seeks to reinforce the idea of a play as taking place in a different space and time than that of the audience, seeking instead to provoke a sense of it happening in the audience’s own context, making it an experiential part of the play. For example, Artaud scored The Cenci for performance in a manner that contravened the straightforward following of the script, turning verbal expositions into arranged sets of gestures and signs (carried out through music, colored lights, and human noises) that were independent of literary references and written language. In other terms, the play sought the agitation of the audience, instead of its sympathy or self-recognition in discourse.

While it did not have an immediate impact, the Theater of Cruelty and its concepts were adopted during the 1950s by collectives such as The Living Theater, tracing a course of dramatic practice that evolved through the 1960s and 1970s "happenings" and performances. These were based on the dissolution of traditional barriers within the theatrical space; many of them, such as Dennis Oppenheim’s Extended Armor (1971) with a live tarantula, implied real danger to artists and by extension to audiences. Contemporary artists such as Marina Abramovic and Stelarc deploy performance strategies that recall Artaud’s own, which, in accordance with the first manifesto of the Theater of Cruelty, attempt to root in audiences an idea of perpetual conflict as the epicenter of life, a battle that decenters the identity of the spectator as such. By confronting audiences with sheer performative presence (Abramovic) or the idea of physical harm (Stelarc), these artists have turned "cruelty" into the core of nontraditional dramatic staging. In more traditional environments, the use of extraliterary resources has also become common practice, although not in the way that Artaud would have intended.

Bibliography

Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and Its Double. New York: Grove, 1958. Print.

Bermel, Albert. Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. Print.

Demaitre, Ann. "The Theater of Cruelty and Alchemy: Artaud and Le Grand Oeuvre." Journal of the History of Ideas 33.2 (1972): 237–250. Print.

Goodall, Jane. "Artaud’s Revision of Shelley’s ‘The Cenci’: The Text and its Double." Comparative Drama 21.2 (1987): 115–126.

Gorelick, Nathan. "Life in Excess: Insurrection and Expenditure in Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty." Discourse 33.2 (2011): 263–279. Print.

Kolisnyk, Mary Helen. "Surrealism, Surrepetition: Artaud’s Doubles." October 64 (1993): 78–90. Print.

Lee, Jamieson. Antonin Artaud: From Theory to Practice. London: Greenwich Exchange, 2007. Print.

Lim, Dacy. "What Is the Theatre of Cruelty?" Backstage, 10 Aug. 2023, www.backstage.com/magazine/article/theatre-of-cruelty-definition-examples-76311/. Accessed 28 Oct. 2024.

Morfee, Adrian. Antonin Artaud’s Writing Bodies. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. Print.

Scheer, Edward, ed. Antonin Artaud: A Critical Reader. London: Routledge, 2004. Print.

Stoller, Paul. "Artaud, Rouch, and the Cinema of Cruelty." Visual Anthropology Review 8.2 (1992): 50–57. Print.