Antonin Artaud's Food for thought:
Theatre will only become itself again once the playwrights command new disciplines, change their sources of inspiration and their writing methods. The question we are faced with is of allowing theatre to discover its true language, spatial language, gestural language, language of attitudes, expressions and mime, language of cries and onomatopoeia, an accoustic language where all the objective elements will end up either as visual or aural signs, but which have as much intellectual weight and palpable meaning as the language of words. Words being no longer used exept in the parts of life which are fixed and discursive, like a more precise and objective lucudity appearing at the culmination of an idea...
... aim is to unleash a certain theatrical reality which belongs to the stage, in the physical and organic domain of the stage, exclusively. This reality must be unleashed through the performance, and thus the mise en scene, taking this word in its broadest sense, regarding it as the language of everything which can be "put-on-the-stage" and not as the secondary reality of a text, the more or less active and objective means of expanding a text...
...We must get rid of purely psychological and naturalistic theatre and allow poetry and imagination to exercise their rights once more. However, and this is the novelty, there is a virulent side and I would even say a dangerous side to poetry and imagination to be rediscovered. Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which, through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the disruption of known relationships. And the novelty will be to disrupt these relationships not just superficially, externally, but internally, i.e. psyhcologically...
I believe it a matter of great urgency that the theatre become aware, once and for all, of what it distinguishes it from written literature. However transient it may be, the art of theatre is based on the use of space, on expression in space and strictly speaking, I don't think it is the fixed arts, inscribed in stone, on canvas or on paper which are the most valid and the most magically effective.
...Those who conside theatre quick pleasure and who deny it the right to take us back to solemn concept, insistent on the difficulty of everything in existence, are responsible for the distrurbing state of affairs in which we are stuck as if blind from birth. Out total inability to react and even to live with the highly acute awareness of the cruelty of existence makes us cattle ready for war and slaughter.
What we don't want to see or end up with is art which fills up our spare time, a lighting conductor, and a performance which is excused its realization in life...
How is it that Western theatre cannot conceive of theatre under any other aspect than dialogue form?
Dialogue -something writen and spoken- does not specifically belong to the stage but to books. The proof is that there is a specioal section in library history textbooks on drama as a subordinate branch in the history of spoken language.
I maintain that the stage is a tangible, physical place that needs to be filled and it ought to be allowed to speak its own concrete language. I maintain that this physical language, aimed at the senses and independent of speech, must first satisfy the senses. There must be poetry for the senses just as ther is for speech, but this physical, tangible language I am refering to is really theatrical insofar as the thoughts its expresses are beyond spoken language.
to be continued ...
Kassandra
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