Surrealism and Artaud

SURREALISM

A 20th-century literary and artistic movement that attempts to express the workings of the subconscious by fantastic imagery and incongruous juxtaposition of subject matter. Surrealism, movement in visual art and literature, flourishing in Europe between World Wars I and II. Surrealism grew principally out of the earlier Dada movement, which before World War I produced works of anti-art that deliberately defied reason; but Surrealism's emphasis was not on negation but on positive expression. The movement represented a reaction against what its members saw as the destruction wrought by the "rationalism" that had guided European culture and politics in the past and that had culminated in the horrors of World War I.According to the major spokesman of the movement, the poet and critic Andr Breton, who published "The Surrealist Manifesto" in 1924, Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in "an absolute reality, a surreality." Drawing heavily on theories adapted from Sigmund Freud, Breton saw the unconscious as the wellspring of the imagination. He defined genius in terms of accessibility to this normally untapped realm, which, he believed, could be attained by poets and painters alike.

Salvador Dali1904-1989

The Persistence of Memory (1931)

Crucifixion ('Hypercubic Body') 1954 Oil on canvas 194.5 x 124 cm

The Great Masturbator (1929)

Giacometti, Alberto The Surrealist Table 1933

Luis Buuel & Salvador Dali's Un Chien Andalouhttp://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2767804934128976249&q=un+chien&hl=en

Set for "The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower" by Jean Cocteau, Paris, 1921. Four years after "Parade," Cocteau presented an even more surrealistic piece under the title "The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower." Crowds were represented by a single person, the master of ceremonies introduced each sequence and explicated the action. Two characters dressed as Phonographs with horns for mouthpieces directed the mimed performances of the ballet dancers.

Two characters from "Parade by Jean Cocteau & Erik Satie Decor and Costumes by Pablo Picasso Paris, May 1917

What Dreams May Comehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teSH2mgbnJE

Artaudand theTheatre of Cruelty

Who am I? Where do I come from? I am Antonin Artaud and I say this as I know how to say this immediatly you will see my present body burst into fragments and remake itself under ten thousand notorious aspects a new body where you will never forget me. Antonin Artaud (1896-1948)

As Marat

from No More Masterpieces

We must get rid of our superstitious valuation of texts and written poetry.

theater of cruelty means a theater difficult and cruel for myself first of all.

We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has been created to teach us that first of all.

I defy any spectator to whom such violent scenes will have transferred their blood to give himself up, once outside the theater, to ideas of war, riot, and blatant murder.

from The Theater and the Plague

The theater, like the plague, is in the image of this carnage and this essential separation. It releases conflicts, disengages powers, liberates possibilities, and if these possibilities and these powers are dark, it is the fault not of the plague nor of the theater, but of life.

We do not see that life as it is and as it has been fashioned for us provides many reasons for exaltation. It appears that by means of the plague, a gigantic abscess, as much moral as social, has been collectively drained; and that like the plague, the theater has been created to drain abscesses collectively.

http://www.mmdtkw.org/VBeatriceCenci.html

Les Cenci (The Cenci) is Artauds only known play based on the guidelines of the Theatre of Cruelty. The play relates Artauds version of the story of the late-sixteenth-century Roman nobleman, Francesco Cenci, and his daughter Beatrice. Written in a style meant to overwhelm the audiences moral preconceptions, The Cenci dramatizes the torture that the cruel Count Cenci invoked upon his family; the familys plot to have him murdered; and the familys torture and execution by Catholic authorities. On stage, The Cenci involves a spectacle of light and sound. Artaud directed and starred as Cenci in the original production of the play in 1935. The play shocks the audience not only because of its cruelty, violence, incest, and rape, but because its characters seem to speak strangely and artificially. This is because the theory behind the play, which is influenced by the surrealist movement and by Balinese dance theatre, calls for the characters to represent universal forces instead of realistic individuals.

I Cenci (College Production)

Original Paris Production

Artaud as Cenci

Opera Version

Set Design for1997 Productionof the Opera

Recent Professional Production

To Have Done with the Judgement of Goda radio play by Antonin Artaud (1947)http://ndirty.cute.fi/~karttu/tekstit/artaud.htm"I wanted a new work that catches certain organic points in life, a work in which we feel the whole nervous system burning like an incandescent lamp with vibrations,consonance which invite man TO GO OUT WITH his body in pursuit of this new, strange and radiant Epiphany in the sky.()Anybody, down to the coal merchant, must understand being fed up with the filth- -physical, as well as physiological, and DESIRES an in-depth CORPORAL change."

opening text sound effects which fade into the text performed by Maria Casars the dance of the Tutuguri, text sound effects (xylophones) La recherche de la fcalit (performed by Roger Blin) sound effects, beating and exchanges between Roger Blin and 1 La question se pose de (text performed by Paule Thvenin) sound effects and my cry in the stairwell conclusion, text final sound effects 2

Spurt of Bloodhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYFz5_abtE8http://www.shadowhousepits.com.au/acting%20artaud.htmhttp://www.cis.vt.edu/modernworld/d/artaud.html

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