highlights and notes from ‘(Re)Sounding Space: Sound and Speech in Practice’ course assigned excerpt of ‘the theatre and its double’

“If music affects snakes, it is not on account of the spiritual notions it offers them, but because snakes are long and coil their length upon the earth, because their bodies touch the earth at almost every point; and because the musical vibrations which are communicated to the earth affect them like a very subtle, very long massage; and I propose to treat the spectators like the snakecharmer’s subjects and conduct them by means of their organisms to an apprehension of the subtlest notions. At first by crude means, which will gradually be refined. These immediate crude means will hold their attention at the start.”

“A theater which, abandoning psychology, recounts the extraordinary, stages natural conflicts, natural and subtle forces, and presents itself first of all as an exceptional power of redirection. A theater that induces trance, as the dances of Dervishes induce trance, and that addresses itself to the organism by precise instruments, by the same means as those of certain tribal music cures which we admire on records but are incapable of originating among ourselves.”

“Theatre of Cruelty proposes to resort to a mass spectacle; to seek in the agitation of tremendous masses, convulsed and hurled against each other, a little of that poetry of festivals and crowds when, all too rarely nowadays, the people pour out into the streets. The theater must give us everything that is in crime, love, war, or madness, if it wants to recover its necessity”

• Artaud refers to cruelty as shaking an audience out of a stagnant existence of naturalism though audio visual spectacle (music, dancing, lights, and immersive organized autarchy like immersive theatre)

• Instead of polite clapping, Artaud wishes to see gasps, screams, sobbing. Primal reactions

“It extends the voice. It utilizes the vibrations and qualities of the voice. It wildly tramples rhythms underfoot. It pile-drives sounds. It seeks to exalt, to benumb, to charm, to arrest the sensibility. It liberates a new lyricism of gesture . which, by its precipitation or its amplitude in the air, ends by surpassing~ the lyricism of words.”

“And it is of little importance whether these other levels are really conquered by the mind or not, i.e .. by the intelligence; it would diminish them, and that has neither interest nor sense. What is important is that. by positive means. the sensitivity is put in a state of deepened and keener perception. and this is the very object of the magic and the rites of which the theater is only a reflection.”

• To deeply analyze the chaos of movement and sound would take you out of the moment. Sit with the violent images and try not to understand it. Feel them. Sometimes trying to make sense of something takes away the magic. Magic is much less exciting when you understand how it works. Chaos devoid of analysis can bring out a primal reaction in an audience.

• Contemporary dance has shown me that an emotional narrative can be expressed simply with a mixture of delicate and chaotic body movements. It’s not rigidness to formal dance structure allows full expression.

• Pina Bausch Cafe Müller

Criticism -Viewing Eastern theatre through a Western lens and prescribing his own meaning while stripping it of anything that goes against his theory. Bali theatre had stories, words, and made use of language and literal meaning, but Artaud not understanding the language, in a sense, appropriated the performance.