Antonin Artaud The Theatre of Cruelty

Surround the audience

Dissolve the division between spectators and performers

Breathe audibly

Do it for real-or do something else

Use over-sized or under-sized props

Groans, screams and cries

Highlight the body, or parts of the body

Harness humour as subversion

Give it the power of a ritual

Assault the audiences senses: all of them

Stretch the limits of Total Theatre

Develop and use physical stamina

Release the potential of dance and frenzy

Subordinate formal language

Create intonations and incantations

Become three-dimensional, moving hieroglyphics

Create a gestural language

Exercise total discipline

Use a different space

Build levels and galleries

Incorporate puppets or dummies

Put the audience in swivel chairs

Employ masks

Wear symbolic costume

Build musical instruments into the set/use the set as a musical instrument

Create crescendos and whispers

Surround the audience with sound: live or recorded

Shock and challenge with lighting and sound

Pulsating light

Find shocking, challenging content

Push the experience of the spectators to the extremes

Move the spectators

Practise a lucid, strict control

Submit to necessity

Hunger after life

Introduce cosmic structures and themes

Find themes corresponding to the agitation and unrest of our times

Remember: silence, rhythm and incantation

Embody gods, heroes and monsters

Stage anarchy

Focus on dark powers

Make a truthful distillation of dreams

Find extreme and symbolic gestures

Focus on gestures and movement rather than words

Discover savage shock tactics

Use painful volumes

Invent/find new musical instruments

Blind the audience with light/periods of darkness

Create a “concrete language of the stage” First Manifesto

Abolish the formal acting areas

Revel in spectacle and sensation

Use trance

Communicate through movement

Imagine a theatre of great activity: make it

Find intense gestures

Create balletic patterns of movement

Create scenic poetry

Exercise body and breath

Build physical pulsation

Research/watch examples of Balinese theatre

Take what interests you from the past and combine it with what you imagine in the future

Never depend on dialogue

Create a language and poetry of the senses

Stage dreams, nightmares and the taboo

Introduce elements of farce

Dub live and/or recorded voices into actors’ mouths

Bounce into the air using each other’s stomachs as trampolines The Philosopher’s Stone (scenario)

Juxtapose rapidly images and action The Conquest of Mexico (1939, scenario)

Trace circles like a bird of prey Orsino in The Cenci (1935, full script, performed)

Move characters like chess pieces The Cenci (1935, full script, performed)

Move rhythmically, like a pendulum The Cenci (1935, full script, performed)

Stage extreme violence The Cenci (1935, full script, performed)

Force actors to compete with loud sound effects The Cenci (1935, full script, performed)

Detach words from action The Cenci (1935, full script, performed)

Use measured and stilted acting The Cenci (1935, full script, performed)

Wheeze and howl words The Cenci (1935, full script, performed)

Use movements resembling animated puppets Balinese Theatre (The Theatre and its Double,1938)

Gyrate Balinese Theatre (The Theatre and its Double,1938)

Roll your eyes Balinese Theatre (The Theatre and its Double,1938)

Make your limbs tremble Balinese Theatre (The Theatre and its Double,1938)

Radiate sensually

Exercise breath control

Exert yourself to the limit

Scream

Be a single creator; both playwright and producer

Abolish the distinction between illusion and reality

Imagine theatre as soul therapy

Confront the audience with the darker sides of their own natures

Orchestrate language, rhythm, light and costume

Use sound as a significant part of the experience

Use music to charm

Use light and sound as a form of torture

Try the effect of voices passing “like a flock of birds” The Cenci (1935, full script, performed)

Screeching machines The Cenci (1935, full script, performed)

Echoing footsteps The Cenci (1935, full script, performed)

Give words the significance they have dreams

Invent an alphabet of sounds

Mix mime, tableaux, immobility

Create gestures out of a state of mind

Use deliberate accuracy

Link breath to feeling

Create a language of the senses

Focus on the space. Create in the space

Derange the actor

Take the audience where they would not willingly consent to go