Tag: Body

Artaud and Adolescents

Posted on by Phil

Connections to the GCSE, AS and A level specifications

  • Theatrical style
  • Methods of creating, developing, rehearsing and performing
  • Artistic intentions

PC: What else interests you about Artaud?

RM: The thing that I really like about Artaud is that he is so anti-theatre.

PC: Do you mean traditionally mainstream theatre?

RM: Yes. I studied English at school and I hated going to the theatre, I just found it really boring and that is what Artaud writes about.

PC: That idea of reacting against ‘boring’ has become quite mainstream and it is the root of the ideas that are studied in schools. Influential theatre practitioners all find something boring in the theatre they have experienced and their ideas develop as a reaction. Artaud is a very popular practitioner in schools, which I imagine would make him turn in his grave! I think that popularity is intrinsically tied to the adolescent condition: frustration with the world as it is presented to you, feeling that you are existing in a world between life and death, a hyper-awareness of the body. Artaud just lived that kind of experience throughout his life.

RM: Yes, it is something inspirational that most people lose when they grow up.

PC: I know that this is an impossible question but can you summarise Artaud’s work?

RM: His overriding concern was with the body and with expressing the body. The whole thing about trying to get away from language is an attempt to directly express bodily experience; not the body as it is seen from the outside but the body as it is lived. The overriding thing is the body but it is also the whole question of expression and representation. How do you represent experience without diminishing it?

Summary

  • Artaud is anti-theatre.
  • Artaud’s overriding concern was with the body and with expressing the body.
  • How do you represent experience without diminishing it?

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 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.