Artaud , Taboo , Catharthis

Today we delved deeper into Artaud.  Firstly we looked at his personal life , as it was extremely tragic it was interesting to explore its effect on his work. By seeing that his art often followed his breakdowns we see that it was used as catharthis for Artaud.

We then started looking deeper into Catharthis and its effect and why Artaud felt it was so important. Artaud wanted his audience to be effected by his work and to come away feeling emotionally in tune to the piece. Like Stansivlasky emotional connection was important to Artaud. However he believed it should be less pleasant and that the audience shouldn't relax in their seats but instead be involved with the piece , rather more like Brecht.

Thinking about Catharthis and its effect led us to Taboo topics. By performing something Taboo and making the audience feel extremely uncomfortable a sense of Catharthis was created. We got into groups of 4 and began to work on a Taboo topic. My group decided to address sex and sexual abuse. Me , Jasmine and Megan were three girls being sexually abused by Oisin. We wanted to show that often quickly sex can turn very unpleasant. We started of by making sex noises on the wall , whilst Oisin went around us in a border line affectionate way. Oisin then became more violent to the point where we got a whip out and became very violent. Our noise transformed in to screams of fear and we all ended up crying on the floor — as broken women. The piece was a huge challenge , in order for it to be effective we had to completely commit. Yet this required a lot of self discipline as doing such awkward things meant we had to almost force ourselves to commit. Once we did perform we put in 100% and our piece was taken seriously and was also easier to act. Watching other groups it was clear how much effort we had made as a class. It was really lovely to see our growth together and it was like in a couple of hours we had all really grown as actors as we were now able to do very out there serious issues. Our exercise ties in perfectly with Atria's theatre of cruelty. Watching the performances it was easy to understand this type of theatre as we all really extensively experienced it.

Tolkien and Artaud together used themes of agitation and unrest of our times to create theatre half way between dreams and reality. Artaud especially created theatre which was extremely important and dealt with current issues with an extreme perspective that I think is really important to appreciate even though hard to watch.