Artaud

The teath of theater cruelty

Artauds thought

an attack on theatrical convention

and the importance of language of
drama, opposing the vitality of the
viewer's sensual experience
against theatre as a contrived
literary form, and urgency of
expression against complacency on
the part of the audience.

Theater of the cruelty

The Theater of Cruelty, where

Artaud expressed the importance
of recovering "the notion of a kind
of unique language half-way
between gesture and thought."

He felt that cruelty was not an act

of violence, only a way to show the
truth and he showed that by
publishing his book.

Similarly, cruelty does not

refer to an act of emotional or
physical violence. According to
scholar Nathan Gorelick,
Cruelty is, more profoundly,
the unrelenting agitation of a
life that has become
unnecessary, lazy, or removed
from a compelling force. The
Theatre of Cruelty gives
expression to everything that
is crime, love, war, or
madness in order to
unforgettably root within us
the ideas of perpetual conflict,
a spasm in which life is
continually lacerated, in which
everything in creation rises up
and asserts itself against our
appointed rank.

Characteristics of the
theatre

The Theater of Cruelty can be seen as break

with traditional Western theatre, and a means
by which artists assault the senses of the
audience, and allow them to feel the
unexpressed emotions of the subconscious

Artaud believed that language was an

entirely insufficient means to express
trauma.
Speech on the Theatre of Crueltys
stage is reduced to inarticulate
sounds, cries, and gibbering screams,
no longer inviting a subject into being
but seeking to preclude its very
[5]
existence.
Artaud wanted to abolish the stage
and auditorium, and to do away with
sets and props and marks