This lesson we learned about a theatre practitioner called Antonin Artaud. He created an extremely unique type of theatre, that aims to scare or shock the audience instead of causing delight or telling a nice story, called “theatre of cruelty”. The topics of his plays were also extremely heavy, and he used gesture, image, sound and lighting to make the audience feel confronted or uncomfortable. Many pieces of theatre that are inspired by him use grotesque movements and gestures, that are often repetitive and ritualistic, combined with noises (made vocally or using body parts) In his plays, there wasn’t much dialogue, instead they were heavily focused on the mood and the movement created, with the words only helping to illustrate this. I also really want to remember a thing Ms Parr told us about a piece of theatre she went to see where it was really dimly lit, and the audience sat on blocks. The actors would get uncomfortably close to the audience and go around, each person telling a different, very disturbing story. Mrs Parr said this was very effective as the closeness and the fact that the people telling the stories were not even adults made her extremely uncomfortable, and really created a shock value. The idea of rotating around telling different stories sounds like something I’d like to try. This lesson, we did a workshop kind of thing that was similar to what we did in red leap. We listened to a few different songs and just let our bodies and subconscious decide what we did. This was really interesting and although it was really hard to get in the zone and not think too much about other stuff or about what we were doing, it created this feeling of freedom where I felt like I could just create movements and gestures and go with the flow. When I worked with Hana and Ananya to devise a piece using grotesque movement that was meant to show persecution, we kind of did the same thing. We didn’t do too much discussing or talking about what to do, instead we kind of worked together and just let the movements take shape with the music and with each other. I really like the idea of incorporating Artaud’s ideas of theatre of cruelty into my CP as I want to explore the idea of grotesque, uncomfortable movements. Doing all sorts of flexible and unnatural movements helps create really lasting and memorable images, which I think would be cool to try and create with my CP.
