Artaud

We have now started to learn about Artaud and how he used a different style of performance. This is my favourite kind of drama to act out of all that I have learned about so far. Artaud would like to make performances that would make the audience experience quite an uncomfortable reaction to the play as it often involves uses all of your senses. He uses two main methods of acting; One called Total Theatre and the other called Theatre of Cruelty.
Theatre of Cruelty involved having the audience feel uncomfortable and make them unleash their unconscious responses. Artaud believed that everybody had a hidden dark response inside them that would never show due to the civilisation of the person. He then made this kind of theatre to allow people to feel this emotion as they watched or experienced his performances.
Total theatre had the actors use as much space as possible for their performance and would often be performed in strange places like air craft hangers or barns. This gave a lot of space for the performance to take place in. The audience would not be seated in just rows like they normally would be. Instead the audience would be scattered around the location leaving lots of space for the actors to roam around in between them to mess with their senses. This breaks down into even more specific methods he used. Extreme movement would be used to exaggerate the movements of the actors in an over the top fashion to really make the audience see the emotion in the characters. He would also use a thing called universal language to make sounds or noises without specifically using speech to emphasise the emotion or feelings of the characters. Finally he would use soundscapes to set the scene without there being a literal scene by using sound. This could be like our lesson where a thunder storm soundtrack was used to set the scene in the middle of a storm without having to use backdrops or props.
After learning all of this, we were able to have a 5 minute trial trying to use some of these methods before the end of the lesson. Our group managed to get a pitch black room where we banged metal to make a sonorous ringing sound, shook platforms for a rickety sound and made grunting noises to freak the audience out. While doing this, we would poke the audience unexpectedly to give them a shock because they couldn't se us.
In the next lesson, we focused more on the soundscape. We did an activity as a class where we had to make a thunderstorm without the help of technology and mostly using only our bodies to make the audience. We whistled to start to make the sound of wind like the calm before the storm. Then we tapped the chairs we sat on to make the pitta patter of rain slowly getting faster and faster until we tapped our feet on the floor to make it sound like the rain was getting heavier and louder. We rustled paper and clashed chairs to the floor to make the sound of thunder. I was told to just listen for the second time we did it, rather than to take part in making the noises. It was really strange how, although I knew how all the noises were being made, it still sounded a lot like an actual thunder storm. It was quite impressive.
Finally for this lesson we had to do a small performance in our groups. The performance was to show a psychiatric hospital so we did our performance about a girl who could see ghosts and needed help. We sat the audience on a tiered rostrum facing one another with our performance happening in the middle. We had someone under the rostrum to grab at people legs for a shock while shouting like a ghost. Someone and I played the ghosts that whispered and stared at the audience. We whispered how we died and that we needed help and the girl was the only chance we had for help. Finally we had the girl who controlled the torch showing us to the audience. We had it performed in a pitch black room so the only source of light was the torch. The grabbing at people legs was unexpected to make the audience shocked while the whispered and the girl claiming she needs help because she hears voices made the audience uncomfortable just like Artaud wanted. The only thing that we needed to do to improve was to make it longer and include more soundscaping work.