Lesson 3 - 20/1/15

Process of devising 'soup'

Today's lesson was a Brook and Grotowski style physical workshop session. I really like their style of working from the inside of the body (the emotions and gut feelings) outwards to the movement, so was looking forward to the session before it began.

The first part of the lesson was composed of devising 'soup' to go in our final piece. We began by doing a warm-up, laying in semi-supine position and focusing on our breath within our bodies. I found this useful because it helped me relax, get focused and be in a position of alertness. Still laying in semi-supine, we moved our knees and heads to either side in unison, warming up the lower and upper spine (the atlas and axis). Throughout the lesson we were using our spines a lot to control our movement so it was imperative that this part of the body was warm.

Continuing with our spines, we rolled from prayer position into the 'table-top' position, a luxurious cat-like movement rolling on the floor, feeling our heavy bodies pressing into the floor. I really enjoyed this part, because it is rare that the chance is given to luxuriate in moving around and stretching different parts of the body. However, I did not find it easy because to progress in the session we needed to cut off our brains and our thought process, and I found that on several occasions my mind was wandering off. I think my instinctive movements improved as the warm up continued and I eased in to "not thinking". This was particularly necessary in an exercise where we spent time alone working as an individual experimenting with the use of our hands and the ways they can move. This was the exercise I think I got the least out of, because I was always aware that my brain was telling me to move my hand, so I think I ignored the ergonomic flow of my hand. If I were to repeat the exercise, I would do this differently and really try to shut out my thoughts.

We then knelt in front of a partner. They stayed sat upright watching us while we felt the moment and moved our bodies according to what we were feeling and in response to the music which was a slow, meditative piece. The music impacted our movement hugely, as we were moving in a neutral,  gentle way. Responding to the music really helped to build up my confidence, as without it I am sure I would have not known what to do. Once we felt we had made a statement, we passed it on to our partner through a part of our body. For me, it felt much more natural when both of us were moving together and interacting with one another because when it was just me by myself I felt like I was having a one-sided conversation, but with the other person being there it seemed to flow better. When working together the stimulus for our movement shifted from 'the moment' to 'each other' as well. There were still bland moments in what we were doing but whenever I felt like I was thinking too much or had come to a stagnant place, I refocused on my breath which centered me ready to work again. We were not acting at all, just responding to one another and letting our instincts move us. This is why I think the partnering exercise where we pushed energy into one another worked so well and was so beneficial for unlocking parts of the body.

After that exercise, we put sounds to movement. We were encouraged to make all sorts of sounds with our voice, and I surprised myself with the amount of sounds I could make. I found it difficult to stay focused in this exercise and maintain eye contact with my partner because I kept giggling as making those sounds is not what I am used to and is out of my comfort zone. We were taught that emotions are rooted from our lower abdominals so I tried to subconsciously use this area to formulate the sounds and I found that this was where the sound was most honest.

That was our process of devising 'soup' in its entirety; a mix of movements and sounds together in partners communicating and having conversations without words. I think that overall I was quite good at this part of the lesson once I got my thoughts to shut down, and I think I will just get better at it as time goes on and I devise more and more. It helped me to understand how Brook and Grotowski worked and their philosophies, as they believed in communicating by redefining language and the way that actors interact with each other.

Process of devising 'butoh'

To begin doing butoh the body and vocal chords must be warm, as ours were from doing the previous part of the lesson. We had briefly touched upon butoh in physical theatre so I knew what to expect from this part of the lesson but I was still sceptical about being able to do it myself. Although I knew briefly what butoh was, I decided to do some more research after the lesson to see if my experiences of butoh were the same as documented about. 

What is butoh?

Don McLeod, a butoh performer, defines butoh as "an avant-garde performance art that has its origins in Japan in the 1960s. Butoh loosely translated means stomp dance, or earth dance. The founder (Hijikata) believed that by distorting the body and by moving slowly on bent legs, he could get away from the traditional idea of the beautiful body, and return to a more organic natural beauty. He sought a truthful, ritualistic and primal earthdance, one that allowed the performer to make discoveries as she/he created/was created by the dance."

ButohUK defines butoh as "a step within."

Masaki Iwana, a modern day butoh performer, defines butoh as "a form of contemporary dance created in the late 1950s by Hijikata. It is contemporary in the very precise sense of the term, reflecting as it does the necessities and demands of the times."

From these definitions, it was made clear to me that butoh is a form of interpretative and meditative dance that if done well connects to the performer's and the audience's emotions. We watched a video of someone doing butoh first to give us a clear idea of what we should be aiming for and I found it both captivating and transfixing with the nasal noise he was making whilst he was doing the movements.We went back and practised our own versions of butoh which had a less range of movement to the 'soup' that we had been devising but the movements we did do were expressive and centred. After practising this individually, we moved together as a group fusing sound with movement. We tried to vary tone and pitch of the sound and it took a while for us to get the sound quality to a good level, but once we had it the noise was electrifying. I took a short amount of time to enter in to the activity; at first I was nervously laughing because the task is so exposing, but once I moved past my ego I think I was quite good at making the noise and connecting the noise to my body. I found this part of the session really therapeutic and found it interesting to engage with the core. The transition from the voice to the movement seemed very fluid for me, and this was something I was worried about. One part of performing butoh that was clear to me was that it is not only for the audience's gain, but for the actor's too. Being completely tuned into oneself is something that an actor needs to become a better performer, and this experience really helped me. It also was beneficial to me because I had no reason to be self-conscious, as we were at one with ourselves all doing the same thing. Building on from this, it was very invigorating to be individuals within a group, as we were synchronised and built up the skills to be comfortable in a company of actors which I think really helped.

Below is a video of a practitioner doing butoh who I think is truly remarkable due to the strength and control that he has over his body. There is a real sense of truth from his movements and he is not trying to impress anyone; he is doing the movements for himself. He does butoh without the ululation that we did, but the movements are similar to what we were attempting to do.

Sources for information about butoh;

http://www.zenbutoh.com/history.htm

http://www.butohuk.com/

http://www.iwanabutoh.com/butoh.php

Lesson 2 - 13/1/15

This lesson was focused on 'emotional riffing'. We were expanding on our understanding of Artaud's work; 'the cost of the actor' and 'being cruel to oneself'. My experience of it was that it scared me at first, due to the sheer unpredictability of everyone in the space together. I thought that this fear may have held me back at first, but I quickly entered into the mindset of the activity. For me, the exercise went very well - I felt it progressed very fluidly and I think I got a lot out of it, having  never done emotional riffing before. I felt like it got rid of the tension that was both in my body and mind, and I thought that the whole class had a strong connection. I was improvising with my body, a skill I have built up in physical theatre but found it interesting to apply with a different group of people and in a different subject. I can see how the exercise could have gone wrong though - it required everyone in the room to be on the same wavelength and to communicate by disconnecting their brains. Luckily, this happened in our session meaning it was interesting and eventful.

I found the exercise difficult; it did not come naturally to me, something that suggests social conditioning because expressing extreme emotion is not natural to do. It took me a while to disconnect my brain but even so, did not ease into the exercise straight away. Our teacher suggested we should "get rid of the internal critic", a quote that I can really relate to as I think the only part of the exercise that was hard was to stop thinking. I do not think I was particularly bad at this exercise once I got going; I think that anything goes in emotional riffing, it just took some time for me to get used to the idea.

One thing I learnt from the exercise was how fundamental warm-ups are, as we could have seriously hurt ourselves if not warmed up properly. We were exploiting our voices through screaming and making strange noises out of our vocal range, and doing expressive movements. If done without a warm-up we could have got injured easily, so it taught me that experimental theatre always requires the body to be warm and in a state of readiness for whatever activity is asked of it.

The Spurt Of Blood

Also in the first lesson, we looked at Artaud's play entitled, 'The Spurt of Blood'. We were set the task of reading the text, then trying to stage as much of it as we could. My initial response to 'The Spurt of Blood' was confusion; I could not make any sense of the meaning of the piece, nor how it was possible to perform it using minimal effects, as the stage directions suggest grand special effects. For example,

 "There is a noise as if an immense wheel were turning and moving the air. Two stars are seen colliding and from them fall a series of legs of living flesh with feet, hands, scalps, masks, colonnades, porticos, temples, alembics, falling more and more slowly, as if falling in a vacuum; then three scorpions one after another and finally a frog and a beetle which come to rest with desperate slowness, nauseating slowness."

When I read these stage directions, I thought they were ridiculous and bizarre, but they intrigued me as to the vision that Artaud must have had about how he wanted these words to be interpreted and performed. I think that from his text it is clear how Artaud's personal circumstances affected his work, as he took lots of drugs and was declared insane. Just from this section of the text, which represents the text as a whole in it's bizarreness, the vivid imagery stands out to me. The stage directions are  much longer than the actual lines that the character speaks, linking the Artaudian idea of actions and physical representations of things being more powerful than language spoken. I still do not really understand what the text is about, and I think that even Artaud may not fully know what he meant at the time he wrote the play. From the feeling, tone and repeated images of the play, I would suggest that the play is about construction and destruction but done in a very surrealist way.

 I am not sure about my opinion of the play. At first I thought it was quite pointless to create a play that no-body understands, but then I thought that this was exactly what Artaud wanted for people to experience about his work. He did not think that everything should be understood and he wanted the audience to go away thinking about what they had just watched, and this happened to me: I went away thinking about the play I had just looked at, trying to work it out.

I found looking at Artaud's work interesting because I was able to apply his techniques to his own work, and I really felt like this helped me understand him slightly more. His techniques that had seemed very strange to me (like the Theatre of Cruelty and 'cost of the actor') seemed to make slightly more sense when put alongside a piece of work that Artaud created. 

After going through as much of the play as possible and performing segments of these to the class, we had to choose a scene from the play and perform a non-verbal version of it. This was a challenge for me as an actress, because I wanted to portray the initial section of the script that is an exchange of love between two lovers, but there were no stage directions for this part so I had to think of an alternative way to put this across. To get around this, in the middle section of our piece we used jibberish and sounds to communicate rather than actual words. We thought this was effective because we wanted to get the meaning of the scene across so used physical actions and sounds to talk to the audience members. When using the script it felt like there were no boundaries to what we could do, and we had the concept of 'assaulting the audience's senses' in our minds when we were staging it. Therefore, we created an immersive piece using the first scene of the play having three main sections to our performance: 

1 - act out the hurricane scene described with all of the audience packed tightly into a circle in the middle of the room and us circling them. We then ran into them and dispersed them putting the boys on one side and the girls on the other. All the lights were turned off apart from one small light so it was very dark and the audience felt vulnerable, hence how we assaulted their sense of sight.

2 - each member of our group went and got a girl from one side and a boy from the other, took them by the hand and placed them together. We then used the audience like puppets and we were the puppeteers so we made them do simple gestures whilst we were speaking jibberish and making sounds that accompanied the movements so they could grasp what was going on. I think this was a crucial tool that we used because the audience did not always get what was going on which made them feel even more vulnerable and victimised, an Artaudian technique. This didn't work as well as we anticipated, however, because some people were reluctant to be taken and moved around. This was an interesting learning curve for us though, because we needed to know how far was too far to ask the audience to do something. This was testing for me as a performer because it went against what I am used to doing, and it took me out of my comfort zone. 

3 - when everyone was in pairs we pushed them all into the centre of the room and repeated the 'hurricane' section we had at the beginning, but with all the lights turned off completely to create a cyclical narrative. We wanted to portray the recurring theme in the play about creation and destruction, so just as the hurricane created the piece and section in the pairs, it also destroyed that and began again.

Being the first experience of Artaud's writing, overall I think the performance went well but was not as good as it could have been. The problem arose in our planning and rehearsing time, because we had so much freedom to do whatever we wanted that we found it hard to make strong choices and stick with them. I, personally, found it difficult creating an experimental piece in such a large group (there were about 12 of us) because there were lots of leaders and I found it a struggle to get my voice heard. This is something I need to work on as a performer because I should be more forceful and direct when I have an idea that I think could be beneficial to the group. 

Lesson 1 - 6/1/15

Over the past few terms, I think that as an actress I have developed greatly. In my skills, I feel like I have built up a toolbox with a number of different ways to approach texts, learn lines, become a character, represent a character and research a practitioner but I am sure that the 'experimental term' will continue to add to this greatly. Before starting the course, I had fixed viewpoints about what theatre was - something I would now describe as bland and narrow - and was extremely naive to the vast amount of artwork that comes under the title of 'theatre'. 

We had a discussion in class about "what theatre is", something we were hesitant to answer, finding it almost a trick question, but upon exploration of the question and the discussion that it sparked up, found that it was the most important question that had to be asked. Some people thought that theatre was "fictional and physical", others that it was "something happening in a space with someone watching" as Brook proposed, "expressing opinions in an artistic way", "believing something although knowing that it is not real", "people pretending to be other people and people watching". 

From all of the answers that we gave, it was very interesting to see that a group of people who had been drawn together by the same interest all had slightly different thoughts on what that interest was. 

We then moved on to talking about what the purpose of theatre is, again a question that divided the class in a number of different ways. Some thought that theatre is "only successful if it breaks ego boundaries and goes straight through to the heart", others that it is to "entertain", others that it is "not only to entertain". I initially said that it was "to present a problem, either with a solution or not; either way, it is intentional". I am not entirely sure how much I agree with my initial thoughts, as all of my classmate's opinions seem plausible too, and I am sure that throughout this term my thoughts will change again as I know that Artaud wanted "to shock" an audience, but whether this is what they went for is a different matter.

After those discussions, it was clear that experimental term is going to challenge, question and confuse me but in a way that I am excited to see the direction it takes me in as a performer and, perhaps, a human. I knew from the reading I had done that the three practitioners we were going to study were all very experimental in different ways, and their work was clearly subjective; many hated their work, whilst others loved it. This is something I am expecting the term to be like: I imagine I will hate parts of it, while loving other bits. 

I have never watched a piece of experimental theatre before, as far as I am aware, and this is the only thing I am slightly upset about upon entering the term. I would have liked to be able to talk about a piece of experimental work that I have actually experienced being a spectator to, rather than having to be a participant of straight away. This worries me slightly, as I am sure there has been the opportunity to go and see the work, it has just never appealed to me or I have inadvertently been too scared to branch out of my comfort zone to see the work. However, this is something that I am sure will change in the near future and I will not shy away from again.

The first lesson was both challenging and extremely interesting for me. It was not what I was expecting to go into as although I had read about Artaud, Grotowski and Brook before entering the term, I did not presume that we were going to be doing such a full out session on the first day back. I thought that I was fully prepared for the start of this term, having read all the literature and researched the appropriate people, however finding the practical element of the first lesson a shock told me that as an actress, I need to be much more open-minded and ready to do such tasks in the future. We did a number of Artaud-style physical exercises which each revealed different things to me. They were:

•  'walking across grid-lines'

These were imaginary vertical and horizontal lines on the floor which we had to walk across with precision and at a fast pace. I found this very simple and was able to concentrate easily on making my turns at the corners crisp. The next part of the exercise was that music was added which kept stopping and starting. I found this quite difficult to deal with, as the music was very irritating and the irrational element to the music made my pace vary: sometimes I would speed up, sometimes I would slow down and this annoyed me that I couldn't shut off and ignore the music. As I was concentrating so much on the music and how much it was putting me off, I was thinking less about the pace and sharpness of my turns, something I should get better at. As well as this, the leader of the session, Sarah, kept shouting at us telling us that we weren't working hard enough and should be doing better. I felt this was harsh as I was working what I thought was my hardest, but when she kept on saying it needs to be better, I noticed an improvement in my drive to walk quicker, bump into less people and make my turns sharp. She then introduced an objective: at the end of the grid-line was something we wanted very badly, so I imagined my parents. I thought this made my performance improve as I was able to shut out the music after a short period of time and really imagined my parents being at the end of the line. The drive that the lines kept changing so I was always trying to get them kept me motivated and I managed to stop crashing into people, inadvertently using my peripheral vision to change just in time. I learnt that as an actress, I find it distracting to have disorientating music and lighting, and in the future shouldn't let this put me off. I also found that I am very determined and will push myself to the maximum, always striving to be better. At the end of the exercise I noticed that I was quite exhausted from working so hard, and I was pleased that I had worked hard. I also found that we were in sync as a group of actors occupying a space, as although the music changes were getting quicker and our pace was very fast there were very few collisions by the end, showing that we had united together. The exercise linked to Artaud because he was very interested in the effect of music and lighting on actors and stimulating the brain a lot in rehearsals. At the time I was slightly confused as to how it would relate to me as an actress, but upon reflection I know that it was to get us warmed up, to get us concentrating, and to push us to keep getting better in preparation for the next exercises.

• 'knee fights in pairs'

We were paired with the nearest person to us and had to have one hand behind our backs and with the other, try and tap the other person on the back of the knees. I found this exercise extremely difficult. Firstly, I was worn out from the first exercise and there was no time in between the exercises to catch my breath or cool down (now I realise this was part of the effect). Secondly, I was paired with a Judo champion, someone very agile and tactical. This is something I am glad of though, because knowing she was so good made me up my game and prepare to fight properly. I was surprised at how much tactics had to do with the success, as based on fitness and agility, she had the upper hand, but my determination and tactical approach to the fight made us quite evenly matched. I knew that I had to defend primarily, and then attack because she was a strong attacker. Going into the fight, I had a negative, defeatist attitude which I have found that I often have if I think someone is better than me, and often I just let this take over but on this occasion I used it to propel me to fight her. The lights were turned off for this exercise which I think helped me a lot because I detached from the fact that we are good friends and concentrated on her being a body that I needed to overcome. The music was like the first exercise: kept getting turned on and off and was very unpredictable. This did not distract me as much in this exercise possibly because there were two of us trying to get the same outcome, meaning I had to ignore whatever else was going on in order to win. This links to Artaud because he was focused on 'assaulting the audience', so the actors had to have some experience of this and how it impacted them before putting it to an audience. We were both extremely competitive (although very good friends outside the fight), each wanting to get the other out. I found this exercise quite gruelling and fully entered into the mindset that it was a life-or-death fight, which I felt really helped me to get the most out of the exercise. I have heard the expression 'fight or flight', where people generally fall into either category and I learnt that my body has a 'fight' reflex. I would not say the exercise was enjoyable but it did help me learn how my body works and how successful I am when I put my mind to something. The purpose of this exercise was to engage the muscles in the body and to get the actors into the mental state of having a fight. This concept of actor training and rehearsals by tiring out the actors so they are in a state in which they are able to take on any emotion was something Artaud was very passionate about and which featured heavily in his sessions. 

• 'fishing lines'

In the same pairs from above, we stood at opposite ends of the room from each other. We began by having my partner as the 'fish' and I as the 'fisher', having to use an imaginary fishing rod to catch her and then reel her in. The most difficult thing about this exercise was the weight of the other person. It caused all my muscles to really engage and I felt like I was really dragging her across the room. I think I would have been able to do the exercise more effectively if we had done it at the beginning, because my muscles felt weak, but part of the effect of the exercise was battling through the weakness to draw them close. This was the exercise in which I felt the least impact from the changing music and lighting because I was very focused and converted my frustration at the irrational music into energy that I could use to drag my partner. I think I was most effective at pulling her rather than being the one that was pulled because I found it hard to judge how much I should move when she was pulling me. This task completely tired me out but I felt there were a number of things that I got out of the exercise as an actor; a developed understanding of my body's muscles, engaging my imagination and working as a partnership. After the exercise was finished, I felt both relaxed and alert, that I was able to move around freely. This told me that I had worked well in the exercise. 

Those are the three exercises I felt benefited me the most throughout the lesson and really made my body exhausted, a feeling that was interesting to have because I felt like I could take on any emotion. It was very interesting to experience an Artaud-style workshop and I enjoyed it.

Research on Peter Brook

The final of the three practitioners we are studying in this experimental term is Peter Brook, an English dramatist. It is very difficult to say what type of work Brook produces because it changes based on which group of actors he works with, a key part of Brook's work because he wanted to try many different styles regardless of whether they were popular at the time.  I find Peter Brook the most interesting person to study because he is still alive, and still making work according to an interview he did with The Guardian in 2011 (there is a link below).

Brook was born in 1925 to a privileged Latvian background and was transfixed on film and theatre from an early age. He became a successful director and was renowned for innovative ideas and an alternative style of working in the theatre. Brook was keen to move away from 'commercial acting' and concentrate more on experimental and pure theatre. He began making his own style of work - often taking a pre-existing text and changing it or even re-writing it to focus in on the key message of the piece in his eyes. This brought him many critics but also many supporters; his audiences were often  divided in their responses to his work.

Brook is probably most well known for his book, 'The Empty Space' and its famous quotes including- "“A stage space has two rules: (1) Anything can happen and (2) Something must happen.”  I have read this book and found it very grabbing and interesting. Brook divides theatre into four sections; deadly, holy, rough and immediate and expands on what he thinks theatre is within these categories. I enjoyed reading the book, reading it in only two sittings because of the simplistic nature of what he is talking about and the complexity and layers of the language.

Sources:

http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/discover-more/platforms/platform-papers/peter-brook

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/81172/Peter-Brook

Brook's interview with the Guardian:
http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2011/mar/16/peter-brook-magic-flute-interview

Research on Jerzy Grotowski

Another of the practitioners we are studying throughout the term is Jerzy Grotowski, a Polish dramatist born in 1933. Grotowski, like Artaud, was part of the surrealist movement, focusing more on the experimental, 'avant garde' side of theatre.

Grotowski had a very different upbringing to Artaud, being able to study theatre and become director of  a theatre near to where he lived. He was also able to establish a theatre company which he named 'Laboratorium' which was where he formulated many of his thoughts about theatre: his 'laboratory'. He wrote a book called 'Towards a Poor Theatre' in 1968 where he stated that acting in the theatre and in film were two very different forms which should not be compared/put into competition. One of his key ideals was that theatre should be stripped down to it's lowest form which was concentrating on actors being in front of an audience in real time.

Grotowski completely opposed Artaud in the fact that Artaud was concentrated on shocking the audience using all the means available to them, whereas Grotowski thought acting should be raw; separated from special effects, as he thought these took away from the acting itself. He famously said:

"By gradually eliminating whatever proved superfluous, we found that theatre can exist without make-up, without autonomic costume and scenography, without a separate performance area (stage), without lighting and sound effects, etc."

This quote shows how Grotowski wanted to strip back theatre productions to their most raw form, with the acting being the most important part of the production and if any special effects were needed, they only complimented the acting, not enhanced or masked it in any way.

However, much like Artaud, Grotowski believed that actors should be pushed to their limits in order to get the best work out of them, and was renowned for holding arduous rehearsal sessions that put the actor's bodies in a suitable state to get the most out of. Grotowski was highly influential having developed on Stanislavsky's 'method acting' and using this as inspiration to formulate his own plans and sessions focusing on actors.

I had heard of Grotowski before, but have never had the privilege of studying his work, so am excited to be able to approach it. However, I am slightly confused about how Grotowski will be studied alongside Artaud as from doing this research they seem very different. I like the idea of focusing back to the actor as I think that in productions I have watched before, the special effects have taken away from the acting, so I am keen to know more about it.

Sources:

• http://culture.pl/en/artist/jerzy-grotowski?gclid=Cj0KEQiAz7OlBRDErsTx47LKz-8BEiQAY0OlYn7UFwyZYD0zJLo0Y_2LANn09_RrqjR6SG0KSK7DpBMaAkbJ8P8HAQ
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerzy_Grotowski
• http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/67868.Jerzy_Grotowski
• http://www.jbactors.com/actingreading/actingteacherbiographies/jerzygrotowski.html
• Google Images

Research on Artaud

One of the practitioners the 'Experimental' term focuses on is Antonin Artaud, a man renowned for being controversial in theatre and turning the world of early twentieth century theatre upside down. Artaud was born in France in 1896 and the influences of the nature of his work can be seen established from an early age: he contracted meningitis at the age of four and this gave him several dire side effects including chronic depression, a stammer and a temperamental nature. This led to his parents sending him to a sanatorium to seek help for him, something that affected him greatly. In one of his most famous quotes Artaud stated, 

              "I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat."

This quote demonstrates exactly what mental state Artaud was in at the time when he was writing and gives a small insight into the experiences Artaud had whilst he was in the sanatorium. Mental illnesses plagued him throughout his adult life and due to his illnesses, much of his work was created whilst he was on intense pain killers, as well as having a heroin addiction. 

The work that Artaud is most well known for is his creation of 'The Theatre of Cruelty' which reinvented the definition of theatre, stepping away from the naturalistic and romantic eras of art which happened prior to Artaud's work to almost the complete opposite. Artaud was concerned with surrealism and experimental theatre which deviated from regarding the sole purpose of theatre being 'to entertain' and moving more towards 'to represent' and 'to shock/disturb'. Artaud was also one of the first dramatists to break the fourth wall and test the boundaries between audience and performer, something very interesting as the naturalism movement was occurring at the same time in amongst practitioners such as Stanislavsky and Chekhov. 

Artaud was not solely a dramatist; he was an actor, poet and artist, evidently someone dedicated to expressing themselves through the means of art. As Artaud's work was so unique and innovative at the time he was working, he faced much criticism but continued to make the work the way he wanted to. However, lots of Artaud's work was never documented as he only wrote one book: 'The Theatre and it's Double' 1938, and he did not write down much of the content of his practical sessions. 

From doing this research on Artaud, I am extremely interested to delve into his work further although I am slightly sceptical as to the nature of the work we will be doing surrounding him. I  have the feeling that this term, especially the work on Artaud will challenge me in a way I have not been challenged already on the course, but equally, I am looking forward to this challenge. I think it is very sad that Artaud lived the life he did; suffering for all of his life and dying at age 51, but already he has taught me that art can help people overcome their adversities, something that has never stood out to me as much as it has with Artaud.

The pictures above are of Artaud at two different stages in his life; when he was in his early twenties on the left and a few years before he died, when he was in his forties on the right. I found it shocking that Artaud was not older from looking at the picture on the right, but to me it gives an insight into how much he suffered with mental illness and trying to portray this strife successfully through art.

Sources:
http://www.leninimports.com/antonin_artaud.html
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/a/antonin_artaud.html#cyVQfJ1yfrX6zLO8.99
http://dlibrary.acu.edu.au/staffhome/siryan/academy/theatres/artaud,%20antonin.htm
http://www.biography.com/people/antonin-artaud-9189906
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/144642/Theatre-of-Cruelty
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