Artaud Theatre of Cruelty

Artaud lived through both world wars. Art emerges as people struggle to express themselves during such absurd times. 

Early theatre, ritualistic, sacrificial cultist activities. Araud believed that you didn't need language to communicate (just as early theatre did which was also ritualistic, e.g. sacrifices for the sun gods) instead use breath and rhythm. 

Theatre of Cruelty

If the actor is experiences something on stage you must experience it to, raw and natural. 

Theatre in the west had become way to hung up on realism. Get back to magic, myth and ritual. 

First breakdown at 16, he had many asylum lined up. He went to France in the war but go let go for sleepwalking. He was prescribed opium and developed a life long addiction and spent most of his life in an altered state. He was widely rejected by people and other playwrights at the time. He did have the help that he needed. In his twenties he hooked up with the surrealists in Paris acting in films and writing one. The surrealists rejected him, they were annoyed as Artaud didn't renounce the commercialism of theatre. There is uncommercial and there is Artaud. He went to Mexico and did psychedelics and wrote some theatre. He went to Australia and came back in a straight jacket because he suffered a mental break. He then was treated with electroshock therapy which was essentially torture. Friends paid for him to stay in a psychiatric hospital. He died in 1948 due to cancer. 

His strongest influence was a group of Balinese dancers. Everything is addressed first of all to the senses rather then the mind. The dance cosisted of everything that occupies the stage and everyting expressed materially. The language of words was not used first so not to the mind but to the senses like smelly. A 

A violence impulse that would rupture the normal expectations. People needed crazy rituals . The theatre of cruelty would be vibrant at all times, music, dnace.

The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid - Antonin Artaud