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.