First And Second Lesson Building My Confidence In Theater Of Cruelty And Antonin Artaud

Drama Lesson One

Antonin Artaud

Antoine Artaud was born in Marseille, France. Both his parents were Turkish. His mother gave birth to nine children, but only Antonin and one sister survived infancy. When he was four years old, Artaud had a severe case of meningitis, which gave him a nervous, irritable temperament throughout his teen years. He also suffered from stammering and severe bouts of clinical depression, which was treated with the use of opium (heroin) resulting in his lifelong addiction.



Artaud believed that theatre should represent reality and, therefore, affect the audience as much as possible, so he used a mixture of strange and disturbing forms of lighting, sound, and other performance elements such as shock and unnerve the audience.

This will help in our performance of The Nightmare Before Christmas as it will help us to make the characters feel more dark and the lights and sound will help the audience feel uncomfortable and disturbed by the situations there put in.

The theory behind the lessons was to give us an introduction to the theatre of cruelty and to begin practicing making effects real e.g. making a scream sound real by scaring yourself to make yourself scream from your gut from real feelings and past experiences.

At the start of the first lesson Mr.Leigh ,who was running the workshop, sat in the centre of the room in silence. Everybody was rather confused, me included. As he didn't move we experimented I placed chairs around him until he all of a sudden exploded, it felt real, hence the lesson follow up. He continued on in a little scene he improvised making us feel more uncomfortable as it continued. When he stopped we shared our reactions and everybody felt scarred an awkward even next doors workshop came and saw what all the screaming was about! Afterwards we were sat a task to create a recurring nightmare but to really feel the screams and the actions and to explore Artaud's theory. We made a simple scene of opening a door, simple yet effective, we got up into peoples faces and made them tremble. I thought the performance was real that is what made me scream and tremble better. I had good feed back the main problem was I still didn't quite sell my fear to our group.

In the second lesson I gave it a second try in a pair, this time I thought of a time I got scared and really exaggerated it in my head until it echoed in my head and I let it out with uncomfortable words witch was repeated softly by josh walking round with a demonic grin on his face. The seconded time was far more successful people feeling more scared and they felt it was more realistic.

My personal response was panic thinking "I wont be able to make people take me seriously as the group see me as a happy, funny and easy going type person. However the workshop helped me build those skills by using previous experience of fright and terror.

I found the workshop a challenge, however it did show me a completely new way of improving the realism of my acting. I will look forward to further workshops to add to my collection of skills...

Luke Mosley