Tag: theatre

Kneehigh’s Instinctive Style: Storytelling and Adaptation

Posted on by Phil

This is the fourth in a series of interviews about the history of Kneehigh with Dr Duška Radosavljevic. The interviews provide an introduction to the company and an academic’s outside eye on Kneehigh as a devising ensemble.

Do use the Kneehigh Cookbook and their Vimeo site for more free online digital resources from the company. In addition there is a fifteen minute audio clip of Emma Rice ‘On Directing’ that I believe captures the spirit of how Kneehigh currently work.

Dr Duška Radosavljevic is a Reader in Contemporary Theatre and Performance at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Her research interests include contemporary British and European theatre practice as well as more specifically, ensemble theatre and dramaturgy.

Duška has worked as the Dramaturg at the Northern Stage Ensemble, an education practitioner at the Royal Shakespeare Company. As a dramaturg, she has worked with various local, national and international theatre artists and organisations including New Writing North, Dance City, Dramaturgs’ Network, National Student Drama Festival, West Yorkshire Playhouse and Circomedia. In 2015 she was the dramaturg on Robert Icke’s Oresteia at the Almeida. Between 1998 and 2010, Duška was a member of The Stage Awards for Acting Excellence panel of judges at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and has written hundreds of theatre and dance reviews for the Stage Newspaper. She also writes for Exeunt.

Duška’s academic publications include award-winning Theatre-Making (Palgrave 2013), The Contemporary Ensemble (Routledge 2013), Theatre Criticism: Changing Landscapes (Bloomsbury Methuen 2016) as well as many chapters in various collections including one on Kneehigh in Liz Tomlin’s British Theatre Companies: 1995-2014 (Bloomsbury Methuen 2015).

PC: Have you been able to pin down what is distinctive about Kneehigh’s style?

DR: I frequently use the phrase ‘company vocabulary’ and I often do specifically in relation to Kneehigh. There can be such a thing as an idiom of a particular director. When a company discovers that something works, they internalise it. I think there is this sense that they use puppetry a lot. Jon Oram’s Tregagle – A Cornish Faust in 1985 was important, as it introduced live music and mask into the company’s vocabulary. Music is now part of the fabric of their work. Songs are a way of engaging the audience, another way of telling a story. When the style is internalised, it is about what you reach for when you’re trying to say something. Their way of conveying something becomes instinctive.

PC: Is there a distinctive creative process that Kneehigh’s uses?

DR: Yes. Kneehigh will often talk about their primary motivation being telling the story rather than the speaking of the pre-written lines. The text doesn’t come first, the story comes first. The rehearsal methodology that Emma has described has four phases. The first phase is about ensemble-building through running, singing and games. Then the actual creative process starts with building the foundations of ‘why?’ Why is this particular story being told? What are the themes they respond to as an ensemble? Work on the character comes next and all the actors explore all characters. When actors are brought together for a particular project it is not known which member of the cast plays which character at the outset. That is something that is decided later on in the process. Casts are assembled on the basis of other criteria that might be important for a particular project. Finally, characters are placed in particular situations and that is when scenes which will form the piece begin to emerge.

PC: If Kneehigh are working with different actors all the time, is there a sense of continually training? Is training done separately to projects?

DR: Training is always part of developing a piece of work. They don’t do training for the purpose of training. Training is always part of the rehearsal process in some way. It is about developing a shared ethos of working together: moving towards a shared goal. It’s the kind of ethos that is concerned with theatre-making as an activity. Emma has talked about her work with musicians. She talks about singing being important as a binding agent for building an ensemble.  When people sing together they have the sense of something being built between them. There is a more layered understanding of what theatre-making entails; it is not just about putting your text on the stage. The actors’ presence is equally as important as the playwright’s text.

PC: Why do you think Kneehigh have had such success? What is it that appeals to their audiences?

DR: Very often when people go to see adaptations they know the story already. They are not going in order to follow the plot or to find out what will happen. They go in order to appreciate the way in which the stories are told. Therefore, the story has to be told in some sort of innovative way. That is why they deploy the whole armoury that they have at their disposal. But another aspect of adaptation, one that Beatrix Hesse has written about (From Screen to Stage: The Case of The 39 Steps, 2009) is how people go to adaptations wanting to be part of a community, in the same way that much of the fan culture works. This raises questions of authenticity and the question of whether it is right to interfere with the original. Emma Rice has tackled it in a way that I find distinctive and particularly satisfying. Rather than being faithful to the original, she has explained that she is actually driven by a desire to be faithful to her own emotional memory of it.

PC: One of Kneehigh’s recent successes was Brief Encounter. What was distinctive about that production?

DR: They originally made Brief Encounter for the Haymarket cinema because the Haymarket cinema was where the film was first shown. Then there was a touring version of that show made with a different cast – they were a different kind of actor that could easily step into an already made part. However, somehow there is still a sense that this wasn’t a carbon copy of something that’s been done already. Thought went into how to make those new actors fit in with this work. It was made with inspiration, based on the original London production.

PC: You could say that film is another part of the Kneehigh vocabulary. How did they use film in Brief Encounter?

DR: Emma Rice’s most innovative use of film was probably in Brief Encounter. Obviously because it was a film to begin with, so she was making it explicit that this was an adaptation of a film. She had characters stepping out of the screen and into the screen because the screen was made out of material that was in fact just threads that were stuck together – really elastic so you could go through the screen. This created a different level of meaning because suddenly the screen was not just a screen, it became this portal into the inner world of the character.

PC: Are there other good examples of their use of film?

DR: Film was used in their adaptation of A Matter of Life and Death with the intention of bringing the audience to the here and now. Film footage of the Southbank was projected on the stage. It was the equivalent to a moment in the film when the characters go to a camera obscura. It was a clever moment of reflexivity. Kneehigh have often used film in the dramaturgical sense rather than just filling in the gaps.

Influential People in Kneehigh’s History

Posted on by Phil

This is the third in a series of interviews about the history of Kneehigh with Dr Duška Radosavljevic. The interviews provide an introduction to the company and an academic’s outside eye on Kneehigh as a devising ensemble.

Do use the Kneehigh Cookbook and their Vimeo site for more free online digital resources from the company. In addition there is a fifteen minute audio clip of Emma Rice ‘On Directing’ that I believe captures the spirit of how Kneehigh currently work.

Dr Duška Radosavljevic is a Reader in Contemporary Theatre and Performance at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Her research interests include contemporary British and European theatre practice as well as more specifically, ensemble theatre and dramaturgy.

Duška has worked as the Dramaturg at the Northern Stage Ensemble, an education practitioner at the Royal Shakespeare Company. As a dramaturg, she has worked with various local, national and international theatre artists and organisations including New Writing North, Dance City, Dramaturgs’ Network, National Student Drama Festival, West Yorkshire Playhouse and Circomedia. In 2015 she was the dramaturg on Robert Icke’s Oresteia at the Almeida. Between 1998 and 2010, Duška was a member of The Stage Awards for Acting Excellence panel of judges at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and has written hundreds of theatre and dance reviews for the Stage Newspaper. She also writes for Exeunt.

Duška’s academic publications include award-winning Theatre-Making (Palgrave 2013), The Contemporary Ensemble (Routledge 2013), Theatre Criticism: Changing Landscapes (Bloomsbury Methuen 2016) as well as many chapters in various collections including one on Kneehigh in Liz Tomlin’s British Theatre Companies: 1995-2014 (Bloomsbury Methuen 2015).

PC: The way the company is organised and led has changed a few times with Kneehigh. That must have had an interesting effect on their work.

DR: Yes, one of the characteristics of Mike’s leadership of Kneehigh has been that he has been very generous and open with his way of working. So I mentioned Jon Oram from the Theatre in Education world. He developed networks of artists and brought interesting people in, including athletes as well as writers, designers and actors. Emma Rice, for example, was an actress from Nottingham who came into Kneehigh at some point in the 1990s. Then she went to Poland to train with Gardzienice for a year and then returned to Kneehigh again. People were brought in on a project-by-project basis and then they stayed.  Some were home grown and stayed and other theatre people came from elsewhere and then settled in the area.

PC: We’ll talk more fully about Emma Rice’s recent influence but have there been other major influences on Kneehigh?

DR: One of the key collaborators was Bill Mitchell. He was a designer and shared the role of artistic director from the early nineties. He is actually somebody that had been associated with Welfare State International previously and then settled in Cornwall. Welfare State International made big outdoor spectacles so obviously design was important in that respect, they were all about moving scenography really. Kneehigh was working outdoors and that was something that they wanted to develop as a company. I guess design became a very important aspect of the company vocabulary. It became their working trademark. I think you still associate that with the company although Emma Rice has certainly worked with other designers.

PC: Did they have relationships with specific writers as well?

DR: Yes, John Downie is a writer that they worked with on an adaptation of Woyzeck called Cyborg – A Folktale for the Future. Nick Darke is another, he had worked at the National Theatre quite a bit in the eighties. He moved to settle in Cornwall and became associated with the company. Mike always brought in key people who did influence the company’s way of working.

PC: You mentioned that Emma Rice was brought in, how did she begin with Kneehigh?

DR: First of all Emma trained in England at Guildhall. Then she joined Kneehigh as an actor on a project. She has described her spell of working with Gardzienice after this as not dissimilar to Kneehigh (in that they are both rural community-oriented companies), however their training method based on singing as well as Grotowskian emphasis on physicality was very influential on her. She returned to Kneehigh after this and in 1999 she was given The Changeling to direct, a version known as The Itch. But the key moment for her and the company as a whole was The Red Shoes. She directed the show and it sparked off interest from elsewhere. That production was tremendously successful. What’s very interesting about Kneehigh is often they engage in adaptation, markedly so since Emma’s takeover. Since they have adapted novels and famous films although they still continue to return to myths and folktales which have been part of their repertoire from the beginning.

Kneehigh in the 80s: Youthful, Distinctive and Devised

Posted on by Phil

This is the second in a series of interviews about the history of Kneehigh with Dr Duška Radosavljevic. The interviews provide an introduction to the company and an academic’s outside eye on Kneehigh as a devising ensemble.

Do use the Kneehigh Cookbook and their Vimeo site for more free online digital resources from the company. In addition there is a fifteen minute audio clip of Emma Rice ‘On Directing’ that I believe captures the spirit of how Kneehigh currently work.

Dr Duška Radosavljevic is a Reader in Contemporary Theatre and Performance at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Her research interests include contemporary British and European theatre practice as well as more specifically, ensemble theatre and dramaturgy.

Duška has worked as the Dramaturg at the Northern Stage Ensemble, an education practitioner at the Royal Shakespeare Company. As a dramaturg, she has worked with various local, national and international theatre artists and organisations including New Writing North, Dance City, Dramaturgs’ Network, National Student Drama Festival, West Yorkshire Playhouse and Circomedia. In 2015 she was the dramaturg on Robert Icke’s Oresteia at the Almeida. Between 1998 and 2010, Duška was a member of The Stage Awards for Acting Excellence panel of judges at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and has written hundreds of theatre and dance reviews for the Stage Newspaper. She also writes for Exeunt.

Duška’s academic publications include award-winning Theatre-Making (Palgrave 2013), The Contemporary Ensemble (Routledge 2013), Theatre Criticism: Changing Landscapes (Bloomsbury Methuen 2016) as well as many chapters in various collections including one on Kneehigh in Liz Tomlin’s British Theatre Companies: 1995-2014 (Bloomsbury Methuen 2015).

PC: How did it all begin for Kneehigh?

DR: Mike Shepherd often talks about his history trying to be jobbing actor in London and becoming disillusioned with that, then returning to Cornwall to work as a teacher in the late seventies. Kneehigh was founded as a company in 1980. It was the tail-end of the Theatre in Education trend started in the sixties. I think Mike would reject the label of Kneehigh being a TIE company but their work inevitably came into contact with people who practised that way of working. They were interested in making work for the community so there was some overlap. Jon Oram was a key collaborator in the eighties. He had worked in theatre in education and his influence left a mark on Kneehigh’s work.

PC: Was creating work for young people important in those early years?

DR: Mike has written in his diaries that he considered it part of his mission to challenge the idea that it was enough to just take kids to the theatre to see a show. He wanted theatre to somehow engage with young people. He wanted it to challenge them or stretch them, contribute towards their development. In his diaries, he remembers being punished at school for being ‘naughty’ when he tried to rescue a friend’s confiscated teddy bear. He sees this act of thwarted heroism as being quite influential on him as an artist. He developed an over-sensitive relationship with injustice coupled with an innate naughtiness that became the spirit of Kneehigh. This childlike irreverence and rebellion is seen often to underlie a lot of the company’s work. Possibly as a result of this Shepherd developed a non-elitist approach to creative work.

PC: Were there other similar companies at the time?

DR: There was Footsbarn, a circus theatre company who did a lot of outdoor entertainment in the South West. At some point in the eighties they moved to France and suddenly a gap appeared in the local landscape for a company to come along and do something like it. Mike has said that Footsbarn was a very difficult act to follow. They had a very loyal audience with very particular expectations in terms of what a company should be like. They are still touring now.

PC: It sounds like it was quite a distinctive theatre scene.

DR: Yes it was. Are you familiar with Sandy Craig’s book Dreams and Deconstructions: Alternative Theatre in Britain? It was written in 1980 and it catalogues all the various kinds of theatre that emerged in the aftermath of 1968 in Britain which he qualifies as alternative theatre practices. Mainstream theatre in Britain up until 1968 had been the usual diet of entertainment and Shakespeare. Until 1968 and the abolishment of censorship all theatre had to be read by the Lord Chamberlain and approved or disapproved. That presupposed that all theatre was text-based, but the abolition of censorship saw something that we might call devising start to appear predominantly within this theatre-in-education practice.

PC: How would you define this kind of devised theatre?

DR: Devising didn’t mean non-text based theatre because very often they worked with playwrights, but it meant that they were devising a ‘project’ including a play and a workshop. Now we think of devising as being something that has developed in binary opposition to text-based theatre which is obviously untrue. A number of alternative theatre practices developed and companies like Welfare State International and Footsbarn had, often overlooked, political motivations. They used spectacle as a way of engaging audiences and, in some ways, to communicate a message. In fact, there are people who have moved sideways between all these companies: from Welfare State International to Kneehigh etc.

Kneehigh’s Growth: Intriguing Methodologies and National Attention

Posted on by Phil

This is the first in a series of interviews about the history of Kneehigh with Dr Duška Radosavljevic. The interviews provide an introduction to the company and an academic’s outside eye on Kneehigh as a devising ensemble.

Do use the Kneehigh Cookbook and their Vimeo site for more free online digital resources from the company. In addition there is a fifteen minute audio clip of Emma Rice ‘On Directing’ that I believe captures the spirit of how Kneehigh currently work.

Dr Duška Radosavljevic is a Reader in Contemporary Theatre and Performance at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Her research interests include contemporary British and European theatre practice as well as more specifically, ensemble theatre and dramaturgy.

Duška has worked as the Dramaturg at the Northern Stage Ensemble, an education practitioner at the Royal Shakespeare Company. As a dramaturg, she has worked with various local, national and international theatre artists and organisations including New Writing North, Dance City, Dramaturgs’ Network, National Student Drama Festival, West Yorkshire Playhouse and Circomedia. In 2015 she was the dramaturg on Robert Icke’s Oresteia at the Almeida. Between 1998 and 2010, Duška was a member of The Stage Awards for Acting Excellence panel of judges at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and has written hundreds of theatre and dance reviews for the Stage Newspaper. She also writes for Exeunt.

Duška’s academic publications include award-winning Theatre-Making (Palgrave 2013), The Contemporary Ensemble (Routledge 2013), Theatre Criticism: Changing Landscapes (Bloomsbury Methuen 2016) as well as many chapters in various collections including one on Kneehigh in Liz Tomlin’s British Theatre Companies: 1995-2014 (Bloomsbury Methuen 2015).


PC: How did you come to study and write about Kneehigh’s work?

DR: I am interested in how ensembles work so I wanted to know about the principles of Kneehigh’s working process. I became really curious about the company, what shaped their work and what shaped their methodology. I felt their work was innovative, not necessarily experimental in an avant-garde sense of the word, but it was motivated by wanting to move forward in some way. I admire that.

PC: What was your first encounter with a Kneehigh show?

DR: I had seen Emma Rice’s Red Shoes in Edinburgh in 2000, that was my first contact with the company. I thought it was an interesting piece of theatre which I was glad I saw. It was unusual, distinctive and memorable.

PC: Did you start seeing more of their work then?

DR: Yes, it just so happened that I saw their next couple of pieces, like Cry Wolf, which they did with a band called the Baghdaddies who played Balkan music. They were basically a street band in Newcastle that they somehow discovered and put in the show. They then did Pandora’s Box with Northern Stage: a company I worked for. My colleague Neil Murray, who was an associate director at Northern Stage also collaborated with Emma Rice a number of times as her designer on other projects later. Pandora’s Box had members of both companies, both ensembles in it.

PC: Was there a particular show that prompted your academic interest?

DR: It was after watching Cymbeline at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Complete Works Festival in 2006 that I really wanted to find out more. This was a year-long festival, the idea of which was that it was going to showcase all of the works of Shakespeare. Some were RSC productions but a lot of them were guest productions by other companies from all around the world. They were also showcasing ready-made work, sometimes work already commissioned. In the case of Kneehigh, Cymbeline was commissioned by the RSC because its fairy-tale origins were seen to fit Kneehigh’s style. Cymbeline’s convoluted plot meant it was a play that was rarely staged and a bit inaccessible so maybe it was felt it would benefit from Kneehigh’s intervention. Additionally, Kneehigh hadn’t done any Shakespeare before so this was a good opportunity.

PC: Why was that show particularly important?

DR: I had spent a year working in the RSC Education Department just at the time when the Complete Works Festival was happening. In the context of the Complete Works Festival in Stratford-upon-Avon the piece had real significance both locally and nationally because it was not what a lot of people would consider to be Shakespeare. It only had a handful of lines from the original script in it. It was an adaptation, it angered some mainstream newspaper critics and it polarised audiences. There were audiences who stomped out and demanded their money back and there were audiences who stayed to the end and gave it a standing ovation. There was no indifferent reaction to it. This was definitely a highlight of the festival. From that point on Cymbeline went off on a national tour. This was a significant moment for Kneehigh as a company moving from local to national importance. The debate it sparked off triggered my interest from an academic point of view. So for example in that Cymbeline there was an interesting use of a singer: Dominic Lawton. He was a rap artist and mostly his function was commenting on the actions through his rapping. However, he also became integrated into the fabric of the piece dramaturgically because he then turned out to be one of the lost children in the piece. That was quite intriguing to me as someone interested in dramaturgy.

PC: What do you mean by dramaturgy?

DR: I mean theatre-making principles and methodologies. I was interested in the company’s methodology of making and telling stories. They did not seem typical of what you would find in the British theatre. They had developed their own stage and scenic vocabulary as well as their own way of working that I was particularly interested in somehow articulating or pinning down in my scholarly work.

PC: Were there any other significant moments that got Kneehigh national attention?

DR: They have had various moments where they have come out of Cornwall and into London since 1980 when they were founded. Sam Mendes brought them over to the Donmar Warehouse in 1996 with King of Prussia, a collaboration with Carl Grose. Richard Eyre noticed them and got them doing a co-production with the National Theatre – Nick Darke’s The Riot.

PC: Do you think Kneehigh’s success has changed them?

DR: I don’t think that they were fundamentally changed by success, though they welcomed it of course. I guess that having worked so hard for years and years they must’ve felt in some way gratified to get to a point when they were getting national recognition. However, what is significant is that I don’t think that success changed their core values in any way. Even though outwardly it might seem as though they are more successful and more worldly wise – the work might have started to look more fancy – but when you go to Cornwall to see the work at the Asylum, it still operates on the same principles. Regardless of their national and international success, their process remained constant; they didn’t forget their roots.

PC: How do they ensure they continue to connect with their roots?

DR: The first thing that people who have worked with Kneehigh remember about the experience is working in the barns and the local landscape. It’s very much in the narrative when they talk about their work. When people talk about working with them they remember the work being part of the landscape: they remember running in the woods and running by the sea. The barns have become very much a part of Kneehigh’s identity. They are a reminder of the core values of the company and their core values are posted on the walls of the barns where they rehearse.

Artaud’s Ideas Today: Cinema and Dance

Posted on by Phil

Connections to the GCSE, AS and A level specifications

  • Theatrical style
  • Artistic intentions
  • Innovations
  • Influence
  • The relationship between actor and audience in theory and practice

PC: Is there any other source of material that people could look as work inspired by Artaud?

RM: I think where his ideas about theatre are being used a lot more is in cinema now. These films that seek to appeal to the body in various different ways.

PC: What examples are there of his theatre ideas being used in cinema?

RM: Gaspar Noé and Claire Denis. There is a book written by Martine Beugnet called Cinema and Sensation. She also writes about Artaud. A lot of the films that have been labelled ‘New French Extremism’; I think that is a term that has been invented by an English journalist. There are these films in France that are very much about bodily change: transformation and the limits of the body being threatened. In film theory, there is renewed interest in describing the personal experience (phenomenology) of watching a film where your individual subjectivity is being challenged or disrupted in some sought of way.

PC: I like the films of Michael Haneke. I don’t know if there is a connection, his films seems to use verfremdung, but that is a kind of disruption. I suppose Brecht was disrupting how content was perceived whereas Artaud and to a certain extent Haneke emphasize the disruption of experience. In that moment of watching your senses are disrupted, life is disrupted, it is unavoidable. The images of violence and bodies particularly seem to recur in Haneke’s films.

RM: Also the way that Haneke explores time: the temporality of spectatorship. The physical effect that the audience experiences is actually to do with waiting and waiting and you are really made to experience that feeling of time.

PC: An example of that is in Caché (Hidden) where the father kills himself in the kitchen, it happens so suddenly compared to more mainstream, ‘Hollywood’ editing. It just happens and you are left with the image of the dead body. You are left with it for a long time.

RM: And Funny Games. You don’t actually see any of the violence but it is made worse because you are just waiting. Also Seventh Continent where the whole family decide to commit suicide and at the end they are all dying and it takes ages and ages and ages and there is a pop video on TV.

PC: Time is absolutely key. I think that is something else for students to focus on in their practical explorations influenced by Artaud: time.

RM: And also the focus on gesture in this kind of cinema as well. The way that theatre is really influencing cinema now is through this question of gesture. The way in which people are looking at gesture as a philosophical concept in the cinema, which is something that comes from the theatre.

PC: Do you mean gesture as an act of moving the body: the hands?

RM: Yes in a very, very simple kind of way. Particularly these kind of films that I see as being ‘Artaudian’. They draw attention to bodily gestures that would be ignored in cinema normally. Unexpected movements that don’t really have anything to do with the narrative, moments where the body is brought into relief through its movement rather than its position in the narrative.

PC: When did Artaud develop his ideas about cinema?

RM: Well Artaud went in the opposite direction to most people: he started with the cinema and then went back into the theatre. In most of his work, he’ll start with a particular medium then he’ll get annoyed with it and abandon it. He started with cinema and then he got really frustrated with it. He decided that theatre was potentially much more revolutionary than cinema. He felt he could actually do more with theatre than you could with cinema. Eisenstein, for example, went from theatre to cinema.

PC: Are there any other contemporary examples of work that challenges the idea of representation and focuses on the body? Not necessarily explicitly connected with Artaud. But is there any work out there that has got your attention because it explores the disruption of representation and language?

RM: I find the films of Chantal Akerman really interesting. Her work uses gesture both in terms of the gestures of filming: the way that something is filmed; and the way the body appears on the screen. There is also an experimental filmmaker who made a whole series of films about the Tarahumaras. So that is an obvious Artaud connection.

PC: Do you see much of Artaud’s influence in dance? Everything we have discussed about time, the body and ritual seems to be central to the work of Pina Bausch and Hofesh Schechter.

RM: Yes and people like Merce Cunningham. For very different reasons Yvonne Rainer: she is all about language. She is about a lot of things Artaud is not about. The Theatre and its Double was a huge influence on Black Mountain College where John Cage, Nancy Spero and Merce Cunningham were. Lucy Bradnock is working on the mistranslation of Artaud in the 1950s at Black Mountain College and how that created the 1960s vision of Artaud in America which was then exported elsewhere – she wrote an article called ‘White Noise at Black Mountain’

Summary

  • Artaud’s ideas about theatre are being used a lot more is in cinema now.
  • The physical effect that the audience experiences is actually to do with waiting and waiting and you are really made to experience that feeling of time.
  • Filmmakers are looking at gesture as a philosophical concept in cinema, which is something that comes from the theatre.
  • Artaud started in cinema but he decided that theatre was potentially much more revolutionary.
  • The Theatre and its Double was a huge influence on Black Mountain College where John Cage, Nancy Spero and Merce Cunningham were.

Artaud’s Kaka: Action, Text and Sound Become One

Posted on by Phil

Connections to the GCSE, AS and A level specifications

  • Methods of creating, developing, rehearsing and performing
  • Innovations
  • Significant moments in the development of theory and practice
  • Influence

PC: What form did words and language take in his early pieces and how did he make it written and spoken language temporary?

RM: Those were written texts in French. He is quite well known for his glossolalia, which are these made up words but he didn’t actually start using glossolalia until after his theatre writings. He always used French until the early 40s or very late 30s when he was in psychiatric hospital and he started inventing his own language. One word that really interested Artaud is ‘kaka’ which is a childish word for ‘poo’ in French. The syllable ‘ka’ comes up quite a lot in his glossolalia. It is also related to the Ancient Eqyptian figure of the Kha which is sometimes ‘ka’ but that is the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for the Kha which is ‘the double’. So when he keeps using this word ‘kaka’ or ‘ka’ he is referring to this bodily process of shitting, which he loves talking about and comes up again and again in his later texts, but he is also referring to this Ancient Egyptian idea of ‘the double’ which informed his theatre writings – The Theatre and the Double – “if theatre doubles life, life doubles true theatre.” Everything has this double for him. The ‘ka’ sound is a really interesting instance of his use of language which is both meaningful and symbolic. Alan Weiss writes about this, he takes it to quite a ridiculous extent, but he says that when you say the word ‘ka’, the letter K, the Ker sound you’re putting pressure on your diaphragm which also facilitates your digestive system.

PC: It illustrates how everything is looped and connected.

RM: Yes

PC: Is Artaud’s writing untranslatable because he used French in quite a free and inventive way?

RM: I really want to avoid saying, because I think a lot of people in languages, whoever they are working on say, “Oh well, of course it is impossible to translate.” If you say that, you’re saying that it is completely inaccessible to anybody that doesn’t speak that language to a certain level. I think that Artaud’s ideas are translatable but at the same time he does use a lot of homonyms.

PC: What were the recurring homonyms?

RM: He has these returning themes of knives, holes, banging nails which crop up as images drawn in his notebooks but also as words, that when read out loud sound the same and rhyme: trou, coup, clou.

PC: His action, text and sound become one.

RM: Yes. This is all the kind of stuff that comes up in his notebooks. He would quite often hammer at the same time as he was speaking. There are some photographs of him where he is stabbing himself on the back with a pen. These are really interesting because a lot of his work was about gesturing then stabbing the page with a pen but he was also stabbing his own body; the text became like a continuation of his body.

PC: Did he draw blood and mark the page with that?

RM: No he didn’t actually draw blood. You know he’d been doing these spells and he would talk about fixing a point in his body and then he would stab himself with his pen – not actually draw blood but he would poke himself with a pen and then stab the page. He also writes about eczema and suffering from eczema and some of the texts that he made, particularly the spells, he would scrape away at the page so that the page would look like a kind of eczematic skin; the writing surface would become like an extension of his skin.

Summary

  • One word that really interested Artaud is ‘kaka’ which is a childish word for ‘poo’ in French.
  • The ‘ka’ sound is a really interesting instance of his use of language which is both meaningful and symbolic.
  • Everything has this double for him.
  • The Theatre and the Double – “if theatre doubles life, life doubles true theatre.”
  • Artaud’s ideas are translatable but at the same time he does use a lot of homonyms.
  • Artaud has these returning themes of knives, holes, banging nails
  • The text became like a continuation of the body.
  • Artaud would poke himself with a pen and then stab the page.
  • Artaud would scrape away at the page so that the page would look like a kind of eczematic skin

Artaud’s Anguine Audience

Posted on by Phil

Connections to the GCSE, AS and A level specifications

  • Theatrical style
  • Methods of creating, developing, rehearsing and performing
  • Artistic intentions
  • Significant moments in the development of theory and practice
  • The relationship between actor and audience in theory and practice

PC: Another important distinguishing point is his perception of audiences. I know that his work never really had a chance to establish an audience but how did he envisage the audience?

RM: I think one of my favourite quotes, it is not an exact quote but slightly paraphrasing it, he says that, ‘audience members should be treated like snakes and they should feel every vibration.’ The theatre should communicate with the audience through vibration like with snakes. So the audience is a passive vehicle. But at the same time the audience are not passive because they become an active part of the process.

PC: Are the audience’s bodies physically engaged with the bodily experience of the performer?

RM: Yes, what you think of the boundaries between the body of the audience member and what they see on stage should be somehow disrupted. But it only seems to go in one direction, so it is only from the performer to the audience. The audience is incorporated into the spectacle but almost against their will. You have to abandon all intellectual capacity and just be, be subjected to this onslaught.

PC: I know he talks about the audience being encircled in The Theatre of Cruelty manifesto. Has that disruption and onslaught been realised in other peoples work since Artaud? Perhaps The Living Theatre and their ‘happenings’. Their Paradise Now seemed to disrupt those boundaries.

RM: Yes, there is a lot within performance art. I don’t know to what extent they are really ‘Artaudian’ but there are a lot of people who speak about Artaud as an influence. Stephen Barber has written quite a bit about Artaud’s influence on The Living Theatre and Japanese Butoh, as well as, people like Marina Abramovic: people that use their bodies as a vehicle.

PC: What were the aesthetics of his theatre? Was it connected to the Tarahumaras and Balinese dance experience?

RM: When I think about the aesthetics of it, the thing that springs to mind is lighting and sound. It ties in with the all engulfing, sensory experience.

PC: It has to “satisfy the senses”. How does he write about lighting and sound?

RM: He writes about using all the latest technology. Basically it should be spectacular. With sound I know he wanted to use this instrument the Ondes Martenot which is similar to a theremin. It makes a weird wobbly sound. He was really interested with engaging with technology which is another way that he was quite innovative. He was quite anti-sound in cinema but he was into using all the new technical possibilities in the theatre to enhance this sensory experience.

PC: Are there any examples of this sensory experience in action?

RM: Les Cenci but that had negative reviews that said it was too overwhelming and there was nothing subtle about it. It was too much of an assault on the senses.

PC: I think that is a common difficulty that teachers have with the work that students produce under the umbrella of being Artaudian – it can often lack subtlety.

RM: I don’t think it would ever be possible to actually really put Artaud’s ideas into practice. There is a sense that this plague metaphor is not really just a metaphor so it is something that is so violent and destructive. Yes we have the Tarahumaras and Balinese dance, and yes most would say his cruelty is not about violence, but Artaud’s theatre is in theory something that is violent and destructive. He was always writing about these apocalyptic scenarios. It is not possible to take it to the extreme that Artaud seemed to suggest.

Summary

  • The theatre should communicate with the audience through vibration like with snakes.
  • The audience is incorporated into the spectacle but almost against their will.
  • Lighting and sound tie in with the all engulfing, sensory experience.
  • Artaud writes about using all the latest technology: it should be spectacular.
  • It is not possible to take theatre to the extreme that Artaud seemed to suggest.

Artaud and the Plague: Body, Breath and Brain

Posted on by Phil

Connections to the GCSE, AS and A level specifications

  • Theatrical style
  • Methods of creating, developing, rehearsing and performing
  • Artistic intentions
  • Theatrical purpose
  • Influence
  • The relationship between actor and audience in theory and practice

PC: If Artaud’s work is so connected to his life and experience how can someone create something Artaudian?

RM: It should definitely be rooted in the body. They can think about how they can use their body, their own experience of their body, to express something. Not necessarily in words. The way that he writes about breath is possibly a good starting point for putting Artaud into practice. In The Theatre and the Plague he is interested in the plague because the two organs that the plague has its effect on are organs that you can consciously manipulate: the brain and the lungs. He says that you can control your thoughts and you can also control your breathing. Playing with those two, particularly the breath, you don’t want to hyper-ventilate, but thinking about using things that you would think of as being bodily functions that are somehow automatic and disrupting them in some way. And doing that with language as well.

PC: Disrupting language?

RM: Using glossolalia, improvising around shouting and making noises. Starting with a sentence and undo it.

PC: Understanding how language emerges and develops in young children may be interesting to look at. Students could reverse that process when working on a text. Finding how the simplest human sounds impact on the body.

RM: Yes and what they can do to a text. The violence that they can do to the text. Rather than the violence they can do to the body. The violence that they can do to the text using their body in some way. It is difficult to say how someone can do something ‘Artaudian’ because as Grotowski writes: the paradox of Artaud is it is impossible to carry out his proposals.

PC: To a certain extent I think all practitioners are difficult to replicate because they are so rooted in a specific context: Grotowski’s work came out of a response to the Polish experience of Nazism, specifically concentration camps. Brecht was responding to the rise of Nazism and life in Germany under Nazism. But these practitioners had work produced and there are detailed records of their productions: photographs and films.

RM: Yes, he didn’t actually do very much, which makes Artaud so difficult. His theatre didn’t really exist. There was Les Cenci but it was a failure. All his theatre projects ended up as a failure. Not only with theatre, he had a film career as an actor then he wanted to make films and that was a disaster. He never actually produced a book: all of his texts are manifestos and notes on things. He never actually produced anything that was complete. Which makes it difficult but, at the same time, a lot of the ideas are accessible.

PC: Did he want it to fail? Was the act of failing in a strange way evidence for his theories. Did he think that representation is impossible therefore it will fail? Like a kind of professional self-harming?

RM: Yes. There are two things going on with Artaud, particularly when you read all his letters to his editors: on the one hand he was absolutely desperate to make money and to live, so publishing texts was a necessity to make a living but at the same time he was absolutely resistant to completion. Yes I think you’re right. Essentially he needed all his work to fail in some way to be able to prove that representation itself was doomed to failure. So there is another paradox: he needed it to fail in order for it to succeed; to show that language and representation is inherently flawed.

PC: You mentioned Artaud’s plague metaphor. Could you explain that metaphor and how it influenced his vision for theatre?

RM: He wrote about how the theatre should be like a plague. The thing he highlighted in the plague was the contagion. It should be this contagious, uncontrollable force that invades the body of the actor rendering all their intellectual capabilities useless: turning them into this pure, affective energy. It is a central metaphor for Artaud. There is a question to the extent to which it is metaphor or to which he really means it. I mean, it is a metaphor but he takes it so far that it seems like he is actually talking about a plague.

PC: Does he propose that the performance should infect the audience then?

RM: It is the sense that there is no escape from it. If you are in the room, you’ll have the plague, you’re going to be infected by this energy, this destructive force. It doesn’t care who you are, you can be anybody and you can still be infected by it. The plague knows no social hierarchy or nationality or language barriers.

PC: How much research did he do about the plague or did he take the simple concept of plague and then run with it?

RM: I’m not sure about his research into the plague. He read The Book of the Dead and he did a lot of research into Ancient Egyptian culture and also into magic, Jewish mysticism and the Kabbalah and so on, beyond that I don’t think he did a huge amount of research about anything. He does talk about specific instances: there had been an outbreak of the plague in Marseille but I think it was a pretext for his ideas.

Summary

  • To create ‘Artaudian’ work think about how you can use your body, your own experience of your body, to express something.
  • Artaud makes a connection between the plague and the theatre. Both should effect the brain and lungs.
  • Theatre should be this contagious, uncontrollable force that invades the body of the actor rendering all their intellectual capabilities useless: turning them into this pure, affective energy.
  • Artaudian work is about the violence that you can do to a text using their body in some way.
  • Artaud needed all his work to fail in some way to be able to prove that representation itself was doomed to failure.

The ‘Madness’ of Antonin Artaud

Posted on by Phil

Connections to the GCSE, AS and A level specifications

  • Theatrical style
  • Social, cultural, political and historical context
  • Significant moments in the development of theory and practice
  • Influence

PC: How did Artaud’s mental health shape his work?

RM: I suppose one of the first things that people know about Artaud is that he was ‘mad’ in inverted commas. It is quite difficult to separate Artaud’s life from his work in the same way that you are often expected to do with other writers. That is completely impossible with Artaud because he only really wrote about his own experience and his own life. He wrote a lot about madness.

PC: What experiences did his mental health lead him to have?

RM: It is quite sad when you’re working on Artaud because there is a sense in which a lot of the madness is glorified. People see him as this tortured poet. But when you actually look at the texts it is quite horrific: all the stuff that he went through. Lots of his work was lost.

PC: Do you mean the things he went through in life or specifically in the treatment of mental health?

RM: It is both really. I think he had something like 52 electro-shock treatments. There were a few years when he was completely lost. I don’t know if you know how it all happened? He went to Ireland in 1937, he was having delusions and he got deported back to France where he was put in various different psychiatric institutions.

PC: Yes, didn’t he get shackled on the boat home? Do records exist of that moment in his letters?

RM: There are all kinds of letters and medical reports that exist from when he arrived in France, doctors writing about his state. He was sending people spells in France from Ireland, these quite disturbing spells, all with holes burnt in them. He got arrested and deported and had to be restrained on the boat back to France. I think there are some records in the foreign embassy. Then there are just the medical reports of when he arrived in France. His mother, for several months was looking for him and then she found him in a psychiatric hospital. He was then moved around various different institutions around Paris before he got sent to Rodez, outside occupied France. Several of his Parisian friends, some of the surrealists, got together and arranged for him to be moved to another place – outside occupied France. They thought everybody would end up in concentration camps. There is no work from that period. There is a gap from when the spells are sent from Ireland to the first work that he does in Rodez, which, interestingly, are translations of Lewis Carroll. Which is funny because he didn’t speak any English so he did translations that are actually rewritings of the French translation of Lewis Carroll. They are of just one chapter from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. That is where glossolalia (made-up language) first appear.

PC: Is that published in English?

RM: I think it is just in French. It is in the chapter of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland when there is the conversation between Humpty Dumpty and Alice: she is questioning him about the meaning of language and he makes words up. It is at that point when he starts going into the glossolalia. The end of Artaud’s version is the end of the chapter which is where Humpty Dumpty falls off the wall and shatters into a thousand pieces. In Lewis Carroll he gets put back together again but in Artaud’s he is destroyed.

PC: The visit to Ireland was a significant moment in his life. Would you say arriving in Rodez was a significant moment? Were there others?

RM: Yes arriving in Rodez was when he first began writing again including those versions of Lewis Carroll. He started doing these big, he called them Dessins écrits, which is written drawings: drawings with text on it. But going back to his early life: his younger sister died when he was a child and that comes back up again in his last text. He keeps evoking the ghost of this younger sister who died in strange circumstances, he says she was strangled by the nurse but he was quite delusional at this point so you don’t know… The electro-shock treatment was very significant because he writes about having died under electro-shock; he writes about himself in the past tense: “Antonin Artaud is dead – he died on this date under electro-shock treatment.” He then invents new names for himself. Obviously leaving Rodez is a really significant moment for him. He spent half of his life in psychiatric institutions and then he lived in what you might call a halfway house, in Ivry. It was still an institution but he was able to come and go as he pleased.

PC: Was that when he was writing his last texts?

RM: Yes. Then he started doing lots of portraits of his friends. The idea was that he was going to sell these portraits to make a living but he made these pictures so horrible that hardly anybody bought them. People, these society ladies, describe seeing their portrait as if they had seen themselves dead.

Summary

  • It is impossible to separate Artaud’s life from his work. 
  • Artaud wrote a lot about madness.
  • Artaud had something like 52 electro-shock treatments.
  • Artaud went to Ireland in 1937, he was having delusions and he got deported back to France where he was put in various different psychiatric institutions.
  • Artaud’s first piece of writing after arriving in Rodez is a version of a chapter of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland when there is the conversation between Humpty Dumpty and Alice.
  • Artaud’s younger sister died when he was a child and that comes back up again in his last text.

Artaud’s Theatre: Immediate and Unrepeatable

Posted on by Phil

Interview with Ros Murray

Dr. Ros Murray has held research posts at the University of Manchester and Queen Mary University of London, where she taught in French and film, before starting at King’s College, London as a lecturer in 2016.

Ros’ research interests lie broadly in 20th and 21st century visual culture, critical theory, queer theory and feminism. She works on avant-garde, experimental and documentary film and video. Her book Antonin Artaud: The Scum of the Soul explored how Artaud’s work combined different media (theatre, film, drawings, notebooks and manifestos) in relation to the body.

Email ros.murray@kcl.ac.uk 

Connections to the GCSE, AS and A level specifications

  • Significant moments in the development of theory and practice
  • Theatrical style
  • Innovations

Antonin Artaud is one of the great visionaries of the theatre. Born in France in 1896 his life was turbulent to say the least. Very little of his theatre work was ever produced in his lifetime but ideas continue to be influential. He was an outcast and was institutionalised after suffering with psychiatric problems for most of his life. He died in 1948 leaving a huge array of texts and artefacts that have been a major influence on western thought.

PC: What part of his work have you been particularly interested in?

RM: It is the influence he has on critical theory: people like Deleuze, Foucault and Barthes. Much of this quite complex theory was all based on the ideas of Artaud, which are the opposite: very anti-intellectual and much more accessible. In terms of his actual work: he is the person who has most questioned what representation is in the twentieth century. That is a huge claim to make but it seemed the problem that language poses for anyone writing or performing is something that he really grasped in its essence. For example, how can we express something without words whilst using words because most of what he produced was text. There is a paradox (self-contradictory statement) there which is really interesting.

PC: Is there one of his texts that stands out for you that highlights that paradox?

RM: Two things really: his very early texts and his last texts. In the early texts he is grappling with the problem of how to express himself in words which aren’t adequate. It is all there in three early texts: The Nerve Scales, The Umblicous Of Limbo and the correspondence he had with Jacques Rivière who was the editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française. “I can’t express my thoughts” was the gist of his early texts. Then his last texts that he made which were, I don’t know if you can really call them texts, they are more objects. He produced 406 notebooks in the last years of his life but he also did all these drawings and spells. What I was really interested in there was that it was just a dot on the paper. It would be just a tiny dot but it would come after a kind of wild gesture. He would do all these magical spells, throw his arms about and then land on the page. He also made spells that have holes in them because he’d burn them with a cigarette. I was interested in looking at the ways in which he tried to record gestures I suppose. The whole difficulty was that he wanted to produce something that could only happen once, a performance based on a magical gesture, but it had to be recorded somewhere. The point in which it was recorded was when it became inert and dead. Back to that paradox: the mark on the page was the only way that gesture could be communicated.

PC: The idea that something could or should only be performed once is fascinating. Does that come up in The Theatre of Cruelty?

RM: Yes, in The Theatre and its Double, where he writes: “The theatre is the only place in the world where a gesture, once made, can never be made in the same way twice.” (The Theatre and its Double, p. 25, trans. Mary Caroline Richards, Grove Press, 1994) He emphasizes this idea that it’s immediate, it is not something that ever can be repeated.

Summary

  • Artaud is the person who has most questioned what representation is in the twentieth century.
  • “The theatre is the only place in the world where a gesture, once made, can never be made in the same way twice.” Artaud