Andréine & Bernard Bel
Seminar: In Homage to Antonin Artaud
Delhi
University & National School of Drama
New Delhi, January 1997
Man is sick because he is badly constructed [...]
When you will have made him a body without organs
then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions
and restored him to his true and immortal freedom... [1]
An "inorganic" body, free of mechanical behaviour. Drawings embodying "the performance of forces that handled the calculus of forms..." [2] Anticonformism, and so on. It is tempting to say that Artaud's approach was "deconstructive" of artistic representation. Nonetheless, this leitmotiv of contemporary discourse requires a closer look in terms of artistic practice.
Artaud stood against conventional aestheticism, proclaiming his right to create from the very day he had challenged Jacques Rivière's refusal to publish his poetry. In his name, many young readers of Theatre and its Double [3] have developed romantic outlooks defying artistic and intellectual constructs (until they reached the status of an actor in the cultural establishment itself)... Yet, Artaud and, after him, the ongoing enquiries of a few innovative artistic trends, reach a long way beyond this identity crisis. Therefore, his message deserves being critically considered in the light of contemporary approaches of the performing arts.
Artaud was prompt at rejecting floating abstractions, beliefs, common-sense, and the glorified gobbledygook that passes for mental sanity among ordinary citizens. In the eyes of normal people, he was a dangerous alienated man, a real threat to the communicative functions of speech and body language. He did not merely venture across concepts, but deliberately overturned and displaced every conceptual order as well as -- if we follow Derrida's recursive definition of deconstruction [4] -- "the non conceptual order with which the conceptual order is articulated."
To start with his own case, upsetting the hierarchised opposition between health and disease: "the point when it was necessary to choose between renouncing one's humanity and becoming an obvious madman." [5] In this reversed order, sanity may appear as a particular instance of delirium. "Medical doctors are born enemies of delirium [...] whereas delirium, that is, protesting imagination, is the rule of reality." [6] Thus, an almost insignificant piece of news is turned to a horror story in the beginning of his radio play To Have Done with the Judgement of God [7].
Artaud displaced the focus of artistic performance from safety -- e.g. reliance on classical technique, etc. -- to danger. Danger as the drive of a creative impetus in which the actor shall eschew gratifying responses for the sake of breaking limitations:
If there is still something diabolical, and altogether damnable in our times, it is to linger artistically over forms, instead of being like those burnt at the stake, who gesture from their pyres. [8]
This quest for an extactic state in the face of imminent death was a recurrent theme in Georges Bataille's Les larmes d'Eros, and it is hard to forget Ingmar Bergman's actor Max von Sydow, in The seventh seal, attempting to catch a glimpse of this mystery in the eyes of an agonising woman. Nevertheless, as pointed out by Derrida, Artaud's concept of "expression" departed from the classical relation between an "inside" and an "outside", to become closely associated with the tragedy of human birth, in which "the expelled reality, the work, the excrement, the child" has no past. It is "in-né [innate, unborn] before birth." [9]
Rarely was this ideal achieved in the contemporary performing arts. For instance, Euro-American contemporary dance had announced a new era of body language, and it certainly searched in that direction, but when faced with the need of formal training it again borrowed a great amount of technique from classical dance... Further, it produced its own academism, recognition signs and stereotypes, which are reinforced in the present context of fierce competition for artistic recognition and patronage. In the glorious years, however, a breach had been opened for something significant to happen, and it did happen: in the 1970's, Japanese butoh dance emerged as an entirely new contemporary dance style in the west. This was the outcome of an intercultural process involving Japanese artists working in western Europe, notably France, and the writings by Antonin Artaud and Georges Bataille played a significant role in this process. In fact, butoh (as we sense it in the works of Ushio Amagatsu, Carlotta Ikeda, Tamano Koichi...) might best reflect Artaud's deconstruction of the actor's technique:
Impulse the body, turn it back to its bad essence. Do not negate evil, take it up as a body element and destroy it afterwards, extract the trance and joy that helped constituting it, do not ingest them, but reject them so that the being will die of indigestion. [10]
We are not able to assess the influence of Artaud on western theatre beyond the romantic fascination he exerted on young artists. Just after 1968, European theatre was still in a state of great verbal agitation when a (silent) bomb exploded in 1970's Festival of Nancy. A young unknown American director, Robert Wilson, had staged Le Regard du Sourd, a three-hour silent play which received a standing ovation from the artistic elite. In his first masterpiece, Wilson had made it clear that Artaud's dream of a theatre occupying the space of plasticity and "physicality", rather than psychology, could be achieved. And the response to his essay indicated that it had been long expected. This wiped out decades of rather dubious assertions of "modern" theatre: provocative, rather than innovative stage productions.
Wilson's work on language, the way he displaced visual and auditive dimensions of discourse, dissociating sign and meaning, may be paralleled with Artaud's effort to expand articulated language beyond the metaphysics of words, thereby "turn[ing] against language and its basely utilitarian -- one might almost say alimentary -- sources." [11]
Wilson:
If you say -- hello, how are you? -- and make this gesture [he aims fingers at his temple], after a while you have set it as a language with the audience, and once the language becomes discernible then you can destroy your code [he changes his gesture], and with this destructed, deconstructed part reconstruct another language [...] If you proceed in that way, form is boring but the structure can be so intelligent. [12]
This attempt to create a space in which the signifier and the signified appear separated illustrates an important statement of deconstructive philosophy: "The linguistic sign, and the thought that constitutes its meaning, are both deferrals of the real and original presence that I have learnt to seek." [13] To this effect, Derrida created a new word (différance) conveying both ideas of deferring and differentiating. In the deconstructive treatment of language, emphasis is put on metonymy, sets of accidental relations, instead of metaphor, the "essential" relation. In the above example, Wilson indicated how it could touch the spectator. Now, Artaud and the actor's view:
An actor who never gestures twice the same, but makes gestures, moves, and certainly brutalises forms, but behind these forms, and through their destruction, he merges with that which survives the forms and propels their continuation. [14]
In our opinion, Wilson's theatre subsumes the ideal Artaud had formulated in his time. Wilson developed abstraction in a sensitive way, dismantling the very structures of time and space to make them part of the spectator's imagination. This approach has been outlined by theatre anthropology under the name of "pre-expressivity." [15] Similarly, abstraction in dance, as worked out by Merce Cunningham, William Forsythe and a few promising artists of the young generation, propels an aesthetic pleasure which is not confined to the palette of conventional emotions.
Artaud's work, and works after Artaud, are challenging the classical aesthetic approach (brilliantly conceptualised in the Indian rasa-dhvani theory) by energising a domain of experience that is not related to the accumulation of past imprints. Instead, it deploys itself towards unexplored space and time.
... Then you will teach him again to dance wrong side out
as in the frenzy of dance halls
and this wrong side will become his right side. [1]
[1] Artaud, A. "To Have Done with the Judgement of God, a radio play (1947)." In (S. Sontag, ed.) Antonin Artaud: selected writings. Berkeley etc.: University of California Press, 1988: 570-1.
[2] Artaud, A. Oeuvres Complètes XIV + 57. Quoted in Virmaux, A. & O., Antonin Artaud, Qui êtes-vous? Lyon: La Manufacture, 1996: 91.
[3] Artaud, A. Le Théâtre et son Double. Paris: Gallimard, 1964. Excerpts translated in (S. Sontag, ed.) Antonin Artaud: selected writings. Berkeley etc.: University of California Press, 1988
[4] Derrida, J. Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass. New York etc.: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982: 329. (Original work: Marges de la Philosophie. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1972.)
[5] "Insanity and Black Magic." In (S. Sontag, ed.) Antonin Artaud: selected writings. Berkeley etc.: University of California Press, 1988: 531.
[6] Artaud, A. Oeuvres Complètes XII 218. Quoted in Virmaux, A. & O., Antonin Artaud, Qui êtes-vous? Lyon: La Manufacture, 1996: 57.
[7] Op. cit. [1]: 555.
[8] Artaud, A. Le Théâtre et son Double. Paris: Gallimard, 1964: 30.
[9] Derrida, J. "Forcener le subjectile." In (P. Thévenin & J. Derrida, eds.) Antonin Artaud. Dessins et Portraits. Paris: Gallimard, 1986: 86.
[10] Artaud, A. Oeuvres Complètes XV 341. Quoted in Virmaux, A. & O., Antonin Artaud, Qui êtes-vous? Lyon: La Manufacture, 1996: 106.
[11] Artaud, A. "La mise en scène et la métaphysique." In Le Théâtre et son Double. Paris: Gallimard, 1964: 69. English version in (S. Sontag, ed.) Antonin Artaud: selected writings. Berkeley etc.: University of California Press, 1988: 239.
[12] Wilson, R. An interview with Jean Grémion filmed by Thierry Thomas. Broadcasted by the German-French TV channel Arte on 14 october 1993.
[13] Monelle, R. "Deconstruction and Allegory." In Linguistics and Semiotics of Music. Chur: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1992: 307.
[14] Artaud, A. Le Théâtre et son Double. Paris: Gallimard, 1964: 18.
[15] Barba, E., & N. Savarese (eds.) The Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: the Secret Art of the Performer. London etc.: Routledge, 1991.
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