Theatre of the Absurd

Looking at theatre of the absurd, I was quite interested with the weird conventions of the the practice. Looking at an extract from 'Waiting for Godot' I noticed that although the lines and dialogue make sense, the lack of context really makes the text different from other styles of theatre.

One of the main points of Theatre of the Absurd that I found quite interesting is that it does not come from a specific practitioner and instead it represents a number of theatre practitioners who shared a common interest in looking at the way humans question life. It represents a common interest shared between all of humanity and the number of practitioners adding to the theatre practice as a whole.

Looking at the aspects of Theatre of the Absurd, the one that stands out the most for me is the meaninglessness and the devoid of reason that the practice has. A lot of other practitioners place a lot of their emphasis on the meaning and representation of their scripts and performances, however the Theatre of the Absurd is purposefully meaningless. For me, an intended effect of the theatre practice, is to have the meaningless words, yet still have the dialogue make sense in snippets. Much like 'Waiting for Godot' the dialogue, makes sense and follows like a story, however the dialogue makes no sense in terms of an overall plot.

The Dumbwaiter - Harold Pinter

A good example of a comedy used within Theatre of the Absurd, is the Dumbwaiter by Harold Pinter. Most of the dialogue takes place between two actors. The part that stood out the most would be at the beginning where both pieces of dialogue revolve around two articles "Dan" reads out of his newspaper. Whats interesting is that both discussions about the articles end with the same line. This brings up the repetutuin. In addition, a none of the dialogue progresses the plot and its almost all comedic banter between the two characters. 

Antonin Artaud

This week we looked at the practitioner Antonin Artaud, a french practitioner who created the Theatre of Cruelty. This form of theatre looked at shocking the audience to reveal the human condition or the primitive form of the human condition. Personally I am intrigued by the style of the theatre however I feel as though it is an extremely taxing role on the actor.

In this video we looked at creating a stylistic movement piece that was disturbing to an audience by repeating the same four movements over and over again. I feel like this can be very useful in certain performances as it uses conventions of physical theatre to make the audience feel disturbed, and its repetitive sounds and movements makes sure the audience is always engaged.

In this scene we created a piece of movement based on this image by Salvador Dali: The Persistence of Memory

The movement piece tries to capture the liquid fluidity of the clocks in the painting as well as the shifting perspectives make the painting seem to be dynamic and moving. We tried to use the sounds to continue this shifting landscape. I think this can be used in a number of places whilst acting. The surreal physical theatre movements allow the audience to feel emotions that cant be conveyed through naturalistic theatre. I like the movement side of Artaud's work however i feel as though the actors have to take on a very challenging role if they want to convey the disturbing imagery. However we can use the large physical theatre in a similiar way to Brecht's representative imagery to create a movement that embeds a representation in the same intensity of Artaud's movements.