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.