Antonin Artaud, The Theater And Quotes

A collection of quotes by Antonin Artaud, The Theater And .

Antonin Artaud was a French playwright, actor, and director, known primarily for his revolutionary theories on theater. Born on September 4, 1896, in Marseille, France, Artaud advocated for a theater that was visceral, irrational, and confrontational, seeking to dissolve the boundaries between actor and audience. His influential manifesto, "The Theater and Its Double," published in 1938, explored ideas of cruelty, chaos, and spiritual transformation within the realm of theater. Artaud's ideas had a profound impact on avant-garde theater and performance art, shaping the development of experimental theater in the 20th century. He passed away on March 4, 1948, leaving a lasting legacy in the world of theater.

The stage is a concrete physical place which asks to be filled, and to be given its own concrete language to speak. I say that this concrete language, intended for the senses and independent of speech, has first to satisfy the senses, that there is a poetry of the senses as there is a poetry of language, and that this concrete physical language to which I refer is truly theatrical only to the degree that the thoughts it expresses are beyond the reach of the spoken language. These thoughts are what words cannot express and which, far more than words, would find their ideal expression in the concrete physical language of the stage. It consists of everything that occupies the stage, everything that can be manifested and expressed materially on a stage and that is addressed first of all to the senses instead of being addressed primarily to the mind as is the language of words...creating beneath language a subterranean current of impressions, correspondences, and analogies. This poetry of language, poetry in space will be resolved precisely in the domain which does not belong strictly to words...Means of expression utilizable on the stage, such as music, dance, plastic art, pantomime, mimicry, gesticulation, intonation, architecture, lighting, and scenery...The physical possibilities of the stage offers, in order to substitute, for fixed forms of art, living and intimidating forms by which the sense of old ceremonial magic can find a new reality in the theater; to the degree that they yield to what might be called the physical temptation of the stage. Each of these means has its own intrinsic poetry.

Antonin Artaud, The Theater And

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