The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything - gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness - rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations.... To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre.

Antonin Artaud

Categorized in : Order Light Break Through

A real theatrical experience shakes the calm of the senses, liberates the compressed unconscious and drives towards a kind of potential revolt . . .

Antonin Artaud

calm kind real

No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.

Antonin Artaud

pain work writing

Theater of Cruelty means a theater difficult and cruel for myself first of all. And, on the level of performance, it is not the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other’s bodies, carving up our personal anatomies, or, like Assyrian emperors, sending parcels of human ears, noses, or neatly detached nostrils through the mail, but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has been created to teach us that first of all.

Antonin Artaud

exercise mean fall

I do not work within the confines of any realm. I work in the unique moment of duration.

Antonin Artaud

duration moments unique

The actor is an athlete of the heart.

Antonin Artaud

actors athlete heart

Artaud sought to remove aesthetic distance, bringing the audience into direct contact with the dangers of life. By turning theatre into a place where the spectator is exposed rather than protected, Artaud was committing an act of cruelty upon them.

Antonin Artaud

distance theatre danger

There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.

Antonin Artaud

delirium-tremens depression ideas

To break through language in order to touch life is to create or re-create the theater.

Antonin Artaud

break-through theatre order

I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself

Antonin Artaud

existence works-of-art art

And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor. So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths.

Antonin Artaud

mad men ideas

I abandon myself to the fever of dreams, in search for new laws.

Antonin Artaud

fever law dream

I am adding another language to the spoken language, and I am trying to restore to the language of speech its old magic, its essential spellbinding power, for its mysterious possibilities have been forgotten.

Antonin Artaud

magic essentials trying

Destroy yourselves, you who are desperate, and you who are tortured in body and soul, abandon all hope. There is no more solace for you in this world. The world lives off your rotting flesh.

Antonin Artaud

rotting soul world

All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.

Antonin Artaud

teeth communication language

There are souls that are incurable and lost to the rest of society. Deprive them of one means of folly, they will invent ten thousand others. They will create subtler, wilder methods, methods that are absolutely DESPERATE. Nature herself is fundamentally antisocial, it is only by a usurpation of powers that the organized body of society opposes the natural inclination of humanity.

Antonin Artaud

soul humanity mean

I call for actors burning at the stakes, laughing at the flames.

Antonin Artaud

burning flames laughing

So long as we have failed to eliminate any of the causes of human despair, we do not have the right to try to eliminate those means by which man tries to cleanse himself of despair.

Antonin Artaud

men long mean

Excuse my absolute freedom. I refuse to make a distinction between any of the moments of myself.

Antonin Artaud

distinction excuse moments

This is why true beauty never strikes us directly. The setting sun is beautiful because of all it makes us lose.

Antonin Artaud

true-beauty sun beautiful

I have need of angels. Enough hell has swallowed me for too many years. But finally understand this--I have burned up one hundred thousand human lives already, from the strength of my pain.

Antonin Artaud

pain angel years