Artaud

Background
Artaud is similar to Butoh in that the moves you make are very unrealistic. However, it is different because you can use reality and storylines to create an Artaud piece. Antonin Artaud was born in Marseille, September 4 1896. in regards to physical theatre, he was a Frenchplaywright, theatre director and actor, but he was also a poet. He's best known for his theories, which created a lot of controversy at the time.

However, Artuad is more about what the audience feels, how the audience is supposed to feel during the performance, and therefore gain a sense of Catharsis. A way of doing this was for actors to become animals. This then helped the audience understand the supernatural element and therefore feel the emotions more powerfully. We could use this into our performance by becoming animals and in doing helping the audience feel the need for the drugs that the characters are doing so.

What did we do during the Artaud lessons?
Well, I wasn't here for a few of the lessons. But one of the lessons we understood how to incorporate the audience into feelings the emotions we were trying to get across. The emotion our group used was 'Happy' and we were using breathing techniques as we were not allowed to speak by sighing a lot in happiness and using facial expressions. By using facial expressions we are able to get the audience to feel a lot more what the actors are feeling. We decided to act within the audience, and sit next to some of the audience and get some of the selective ones to stand up and join in almost. However, most of the audience felt freaked out rather than happy by the performance which has helped us understand that negative emotions come across better during performances in Artaud.

Also, we had a lesson where we were in groups and we had to portray a fairytale scene and use Artaud's techniques. We decided to go for the Lion King where Scar kills Mufasa. We then had a person play 'the tree' which was also dying like Mufasa was killed slowly. This incorporated some of Butoh's ideas of nature being played by actors. We also had Simba coming from the audience when he finds out that Mufasa is killed.

What is Artaud like?
- Jacque Le Coq - As we are going into the subconscious mind, however, a lot of what you do is improvised in movements. However, you don't need to use masks to go into the subconscious as you do it yourself.
- Butoh - as said previously, however, you don't use breathing techniques in Butoh but you do in Artaud to explain theories.
- Mime, in that you are improvising a lot in performances.