Right at the beginning of this lesson we looked at a new practitioner called Antonin Artaud 1896-1948. First watching videos from his work and concluding as a class that his work is quite disturbing, crazy and uncomfortable to watch. From these reactions to the video we looked at a quote from Banksy that best describes Artauds goal in theatre which was " To disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed." The theories we gathered that can further describe Artauds goal was that he wanted his audience to see the negatives in order to see the positives, to produce and show the audience violent, physical images to pulverize and mesmerize them.
Generalizing this type of theatre it would be known as Cruelty Theatre which removes barriers between the actors and audiences and bombard their senses. The cruelty is for the actors to completely strip away their masks and the cruelty of showing an audience a truth that they don't want to see. To do the opposite than expected to the audience. Artaudian performances mainly consisted of screams, weird noises and physical rough movement. Also by throwing yourself into the performance using these qualities you reject natural conventional reforms.
Further along the lesson we did activities to reveal the double, we were given a poem in pairs where we had to create a performance using the text without saying the poem but using Artaudian techniques to tell the poem with screams, physical movements and universal language- sounds and sound scapes. Then we were in groups of four and we did a similar activity but with another poem where we made it as Artaudian as possible and performed it to the rest of the class. At the end after watching everyone's performances we talked about Artaudian performances again and how it can be challenging but once its pulled together its effective when telling a story or a poem.
Generalizing this type of theatre it would be known as Cruelty Theatre which removes barriers between the actors and audiences and bombard their senses. The cruelty is for the actors to completely strip away their masks and the cruelty of showing an audience a truth that they don't want to see. To do the opposite than expected to the audience. Artaudian performances mainly consisted of screams, weird noises and physical rough movement. Also by throwing yourself into the performance using these qualities you reject natural conventional reforms.
Further along the lesson we did activities to reveal the double, we were given a poem in pairs where we had to create a performance using the text without saying the poem but using Artaudian techniques to tell the poem with screams, physical movements and universal language- sounds and sound scapes. Then we were in groups of four and we did a similar activity but with another poem where we made it as Artaudian as possible and performed it to the rest of the class. At the end after watching everyone's performances we talked about Artaudian performances again and how it can be challenging but once its pulled together its effective when telling a story or a poem.
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