Enter Artaud

Abstract

In his writings, Antonin Artaud (1895–1948) vehemently dethroned those “reptiles of authors” ¹ in order to establish the director as the new theatre authority. His astounding impact on later generations of auteurs has been associated with his innovative ideas in relation to the spiritual and holistic view of art, the cultural and anthropological interest in performance, the imagist and sensuous conception of the theatre event, the redefinition of the performance text, and, in the end, the emphasis on theatre as “process.” Because of his influence, he has often been hailed as a shaman and a physician for culture, responsible not only for the total reinvention of the stage, but also for a radically changed conception of the arts. From the 1960s on, the avant-garde movement, fighting for the “reinvention” of theatre, eagerly took on his iconoclastic theories, making them a banner for artistic revolution, including the deconstruction of literary text and the redefinition of performance. Artaud’s emphasis on the creative role of the director is inextricably linked to auteur practice. Clearly, his principles formulated a trend, an aesthetic that gave momentum and support to the work of prominent companies, especially those falling under the somewhat portentous, all-i nclusive labels of “avant-garde,” “underground,” and “experimental.”

My aim is to liberate a certain theatrical reality which belongs exclusively to the stage, to the physical and organic domain of the stage. This reality must be liberated by means of spectacle, and therefore by mise-en-scène in the broadest sense of the word, that is, as the language of everything that can be put on the stage, rather than as the secondary reality of a script, the more or less active and objective means of expansion of the script. Here, therefore, the director becomes the author, that is, the creator. (Artaud Selected Writings [SW], 299)