Re: artaud exhibit

["Fiona Webster" <fi>]

Mitch writes:
> Moi, I don't know at all who Artaud was.  

I'm woefully behind on doing updates for the "people have the power" 
section of the website (and some of you owe me writeups -- hint, 
hint), but I do have this useful bit on Artaud that Mary Lynch sent 
me:

     Antonin Artaud: 1896-1948

     Actor,director,writer,artist,founder of the "theatre of cruelty"

     A visionary and a mystic. He saw the theatre as a ritual able to
     give rise to a numinous experience within the spectator. He
     believed that new myths must be found for modern audiences, as we
     no longer participate in the same mysteries as in the past. In
     Artaud's article "Metaphysics and the mise en scene," he
     discusses the decline in the meaningfulness of certain myths to
     painting. Artaud called his theatre the Theatre of Cruelty. He
     wrote two manifestoes entitled "the Theatre of Cruelty" and "The
     Theatre and Cruelty". Through it, he meant to enable the viewer
     to project his or her feelings and sensations beyond the usual
     limits imposed by time and space. The audience would be capable
     of having a powerful metaphysical experience whle watching the
     stage. Afterwards, the audience would feel purified. Quote from
     Artaud: "I employ the word cruelty in the sense of an appetite
     for life, a cosmic rigor,an implacable necessity,in the gnostic
     sense of a living whirlwind that devours darkness, in the sense
     that pain apart from whose ineluctable necessity life could not
     continue; good is desired, it is the consequence of an act; evil
     is permanent."

     From _Antonin Artaud: Man of Vision_ by Bettina Knapp

				--Fiona