Concept information
PREFERRED TERM
2297Theatre of cruelty
BROADER CONCEPT
SCOPE NOTE
- Term coined in the 1930s by Antonin Artaud to describe his manifesto theory for the theatre he envisaged. Attacking Western bourgeois culture en bloc, he championed the necessity for an uncompromising mise-en-scène, that would disentangle theatre from literature and the tyranny of the word, bringing together actor and spectator in a mystical and shocking experience. The latter entailed subjecting the spectators to emotional shock treatment, to free them from the grip of discursive and logical thought. He sought to combine his theories with elements of Eastern dance drama to create a violent and ritualistic form of theatre. The text is offered in a kind of ritual incantation (rather than being spoken in the mode of psychological interpretation). The whole stage is used as in a ritual, as a producer of images (hieroglyphs) addressed to the spectator's unconscious. The innovative ideas introduced in relation to the spiritual and the holistic view of art, the cultural and anthropological interest in performance, the imagist and sensuous conception of the theatre event, the new role of the audience as one of participation and visceral involvement, the redefinition of the performance text and the emphasis on theatre as a process and not a finished product had a profound impact on the physical experiments of the 1960s and 1970s.
SOURCE
- Artaud 1992
- Sidiropoulou 2011
CONTRIBUTOR
- Katsiadakis Helen (AA)
CREATOR
- Goulis Helen (AA)
NOTATION
- 2297
IN OTHER LANGUAGES
-
French
-
German
-
Greek
URI
https://humanitiesthesaurus.academyofathens.gr/dyas-resource/Concept/2297
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