Antonin Artaud

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Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, better known as Antonin Artaud (pronounced [tna]; 4 September 1896 – March 1948), was a French writer, poet, dramatist, essayist, and theatre director. He is widely known as one of Europe's top figures. Through his conceptualization of the Theatre of Cruelty, he had a major influence on twentieth-century theatre. His books, which are known for his raw, surreal, and transgressive work, debating topics from ancient cultures', philosophy, the occult, misticism, and indigenous Mexican and Balinese traditions.

Early life

Antonin Artaud was born in Marseille, France, and Antoine-Roi Artaud and Euphrasie Nalpas followed him. His parents were his first cousins; his grandmothers were sisters from Smyrna (modern day: Istanbul). Catherine Chilé, his paternal grandmother, was born in Marseille, France, where she married Marius Artaud, a Frenchman. Mariette Chilé, his maternal grandmother, grew up in Smyrna, where she married Louis Nalpas, a local ship chandler. His Greek ancestry had a huge influence on his life throughout his life.

Euphrasie gave birth to nine children, but four of them were stillborn and two others died in childhood. Artaud was diagnosed with meningitis at the age of five, a condition that had no cure at the time. "given the prevalence of such misdiagnoses, as well as the absence of a cure (and consequently low survival rate) and the symptoms he had, it's unlikely that Artaud contracted it," biographer David Shafer points out.

Artaud was a student at the Collége Sacré-Coeur from 1907 to 1914. Here's where he started reading Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Edgar Allan Poe's books, as well as founding a private literary journal in collaboration with his colleagues. He began to noticeably withdraw from social life at the end of college, "ruined the majority of his writing, and gave up his books." "3:3 He was distraught, his parents arranged for him to see a psychiatrist."

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Artaud was exposed to a string of sanatoria over the next five years. 163 When Artaud was conscripted into the French Army, there was a halt in his therapy in 1916. 26 He was kicked out for "unspecified health reasons" (Artaud would later say it was "due to sleepwalking), but his mother attributed it to his "nervous illness"). 4.6 The director of the Sanatorium in May 1919 recommended laudanum for Artaud, triggering a lifelong dependency on the drug and other opiates. 162 Artaud migrated to Paris in 1921, where he was admitted as a boarder under Dr. Édouard Toulouse's psychiatric care.

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Career

Artaud spent time in Paris with a number of notable French "teacher-directors." Jacques Copeau, André Antoine, Georges, and Ludmilla Pitoff were among those on the panel, as well as Charles Dullin, Firmin Gémier, and Lugné Poe. Artaud's first performance in a professional theatre would later refer to Artaud as a "painer lost in the midst of actors." 350 Artaud's main dramatic preparation came as part of Dullin's company, Théâtre de l'Atelier, which he joined in 1921.

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Artaud trained for ten to twelve hours a day as a member of Dullin's troupe. 119 Artaud was a strong supporter of Dullin's teaching, saying, "Hearing Dullin teach me I feel that I'm rediscovering ancient mysteries and a whole forgotten mystery of production." 351 In particular, they expressed a keen interest in east Asian theater, specifically in Bali and Japan's performance traditions. However, ten Dullin did not agree that Western theater should be using the language and style of east Asian theatre. Instead, he advocated a theatre of transposition; for Dullin, "to insist that our Western theater rules of a long tradition of its own symbolic language would be a big mistake."

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Artaud came to disagree with several of Dullin's theories. 352 He was dissatisfied with his role in Alexandre Arnoux's Huon de Bordeaux in 1923, and he will continue with them until next year, when he will put more emphasis on his film work.

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Artaud sent some of his poems to the journal La Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF); they were rejected, but the poems' editor, Jacques Rivière, who requested a meeting, was intrigued. They continued their friendship after connecting via mail. Artaud's first major publication was the recompilation of these letters into an epistolary work, Correspondence avec Jacques Riviere. Artaud's son "First Manifesto for a Theatre of Cruelty" (1932) and "Theatre and the plague" (1933) are among his collection of works in the NRF. When assembling The Theatre and Its Double, 105 He would draw on these publications.

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Artaud also worked in film as a critic, actor, and writer. Artaud's performance as Jean-Paul Marat in Abel Gance's Napoléon (1927) had exaggerated movements to convey Marat's vivacious personality. He appeared in Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). 17 He produced a number of film scenarios, ten of which have survived. 23 The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928) was only one of Artaud's scenarios. Many commentators and scholars believe this to be the first surrealist film, directed by Germaine Dulac.

Artaud briefly attended the surrealists before being dismissed by André Breton in 1927. 21 This was in part due to the Surrealists' growing affiliation with the Communist Party in France. 274 "Artaud was not into politics at all,' Ros Murray writes, "I shit on Marxism." In addition, 'Breton was becoming very anti-theatre because he felt theatre as being bourgeois and anti-revolutionary.' Artaud's book 'The Manifesto for an Abortive Theatre (1926/27), written for the Theatre Alfred Jarry, puts a direct threat on the surrealists, who say that to produce theatre today is a counter-revolutionary effort.' 24 He claims they are "bowing down to Communism," as25 in 'a lazy man's revival', a call for a more 'essential metamorphosis' of society.

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(For more information, including a complete list of performances, see Théâtre Alfred Jarry).

Artaud, Robert Aron, and Roger Vitrac, the deposed surrealist, established the Théâtre Alfred Jarry in 1926. (TAJ). Between June 1927 and January 1929, they produced four productions. The Theatre was short-lived, but a diverse number of European artists, including Arthur Adamov, André Gide, and Paul Valéry, attended the performance.

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Artaud performed Balinese dance at the Paris Colonial Exposition in 1931. Although Artaud mistook much of what he saw, it did influence several of his theatre's ideas. 26 Adrian Curtin has discussed the importance of Artaud's use of music and sound, noting that the gamelan ensemble's "hypnotic" rhythms, the variety of timbres produced by the musicians, and – perhaps more importantly – the way in which the dancers' movements interacted in concert with the musical elements rather than simply being a sort of background accompaniment.

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At the Théâtre des Folies-Wagram in Paris, Artaud staged an original version of Percy Bysshe Shelley's The Cenci in 1935. 250 The drama was Artaud's only chance to stage a Theatre of Cruelty performance, and he stressed the nefarious and brutal, especially "its themes of incest, revenge, and familial murder." :21 Artaud's opening scene "suggestive of extreme atmospheric turbulence," with wind-blown drapes, waves of recently amplified sound, and crowds of people gathered in a "furious orgy," as well as the presence of numerous large mannequins. 119 Scholar Adrian Curtin has argued for the importance of the'sonic's of the production, which did not only promote the operation but also motivated it obliquely. "251" is a characterization of Shelley's version of The Cenci's motivations and anguish of her mother Beatrice and her father's by monologues, Artaud was much more concerned about conveying the threatening presence of the Cenci's presence and the reverberations of their incest union as if an invisible "force field" surrounds them.

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Jane Goodall writes of The Cenci,

The Cenci was a commercial failure, but it had innovative sound effects—including the first theatrical use of the electronic device, Ondes Martenot—and had a Balthus set.

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