... to which play Artaud should put on.
Artaud argued against classical texts like 'Oedipus' in "No More Masterpieces"... yet his list of plays, which include Shakespeare, for me contradicted this, and suggested he wanted to stage these masterpieces.
I'd argue that 'One of the Marquis de Sade's tales' is perhaps the play in Artaud's programme (pg.77) that is closest to some of his ideas... perhaps like the Theatre of Cruelty? The tales are full of violence and eroticism and the "externalisation of cruelty". Tales like '100 years of Sodom', feature orgies and sexual fantasies and rape.
But then, I never thought that the Theatre of Cruelty was about a physical kind of violence, not an external one. But not a pyschological violence either...
Saturday, 20 October 2007
Friday, 19 October 2007
Scheer Reading for week 4
Extract from Scheer (1997) ‘The madness of the oeuvre: Artaud and Foucault’ in Foucault the Legacy. QUT Press. 1997. Clare O’Farrell ed. pp169-181.
1. Foucault's folie
In Foucault's original preface to Histoire de la folie à l'age classique, he characterises la folie for the first time as "Rien d'autre sans doute que l'absence d'oeuvre".(HF v) La folie: madness, but also a word covering a range of meanings from slight eccentricity to clinical insanity. It is here situated in a relation to oeuvre: work, product, work of art, body of work. Histoire de la folie is, at least in part, the history of this relation and its formulation in this phrase which, in its different modalities, moves through Foucault's various histoires de la folie clearing a space in which la folie can be conceptualised without confining it.
The history begins, appropriately, after the book itself when Henri Gouhier, the head of the jury which in May 1961 heard Foucault's defence of his doctoral thesis Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'age classique, which comprised the text of the first of the three different French publications of this work, said that he didn't understand what Foucault meant by defining la folie as l'absence d'oeuvre. Foucault's detailed replies can be read in his essays Le Non du père of 1962 and La Folie, l'absence d'oeuvre of 1964. In these texts Foucault demarcates the series of historical discontinuities that established the necessity of the link between the oeuvre and an understanding of the place of madness. Yet later, in the revised preface to the 1972 edition of Histoire de la folie, Foucault attempts to play down the significance of his phrase as a formulation given "un peu a l'aveugle" (somewhat unwittingly or blindly). (HF 8) Shoshana Felman has noted that in the French translation of Hegel's Encyclopoedia, the entry under "la folie" says that "blindness is the distinctive characteristic of madness". Perhaps in this later preface to his book we are reading Foucault's ironic acknowledgement that defining madness is itself a mad gesture, though not quite an acknowlegement that, as Derrida characterises it, his entire project in Histoire de la folie is mad.
In Derrida's notorious encounter with this text the phrase is "une note de base" (a fundamental motif)(C 83 tr.54) in Foucault's book. This is perhaps because he recognises its centrality to the problematical project of a history of madness and also perhaps because a certain interpretation of it neatly fits his arguments since if the absence of the oeuvre signifies "the lack of any conventionally determined structure", syntactical, narratological, aesthetic etc. "it implies that madness is both de jure and de facto excluded from Descartes' text, and from Foucault's writing about madness, both of which are inevitably bound up with 'Reason in general'."
It is a phrase which thereby threatens to conceptually undermine Foucault's entire project simply because it is a formulation of madness, a gesture of confinement. Yet the foreclosure of the project would depend on an epistemologically closed position, an absolute determination, of which this phrase constitutes only a possible and, as I will argue, inverse embodiment. It is not a blithe positivistic gesture but a negative lyrical framing which, however, with respect to at least one of its subjects, ironically serves to exclude a project which it had been the work of the book (Histoire de la folie) to re-insert into history. This 'fundamental motif' of the book reappears at its end as the structuring principle of a certain radical discursive practice, linking the themes of Histoire de la folie with the work of one of its central figures: Antonin Artaud.
Derrida's assertion of the fundamental importance of this phrase to Foucault's book is given some justification in the original preface to the 1961 publication of Histoire de la folie in which Foucault links the absence of the oeuvre to the possiblity of history itself and therefore to the production of Foucault's own oeuvre, "." (the great oeuvre of the history of the world is ineradicably accompanied by an absence of the oeuvre).(HF vi) This is based on Foucault's earlier assertion that "." (the relation of reason to unreason constitutes for Western culture one of the dimensions of its originality, it went with it well before Jerome Bosch, and will long survive Nietzsche and Artaud." (HF iii) This is the first mention of Artaud in the book and one in which he is introduced as an index of the density of the relation of reason to unreason, their proximity as well as their historical incommensurability. With Nietzsche, the name of Artaud becomes a marker in the passage of Western history which should have never appeared if his madness had silenced him as effectively as Foucault and Derrida tell us.
It is here in what Foucault calls "ce simple problème d'élocution" (this simple problem of elocution) (ibid) this intransmissibility of madness in language that we read his desire to produce an oeuvre which must remain absent, for there is no language with which to " (bring to the surface of the language of reason a division and a debate which must necessarily remain below, since this language only makes sense above and beyond them).(ibid) There is no language for the experience of la folie for it would have to be "." (sufficiently open to allow the decisive words by which the truth of la folie and reason are constituted for us to inscribe themselves there without betrayal). (ibid) The dream of madness in which the ratio wakes to find itself unharmed but none the wiser is one which continually interrupts Foucault's work, just as it haunted both Descartes' and Derrida's.
Foucault's rhythmical reiteration of the impossibility of the very book which follows this preface would seem to be a kind of textual abreacting by which responses to its propositions are anticipated and included within those propositions themselves. This strategy is, as has already been noted, everywhere evident in Artaud's oeuvre. It is his dominant stylistic method which Foucault also employs to short-circuit critical receptions based on the critique of a given position. All positions in Foucault and Artaud are contingent and polemical. Foucault's call for a new language also echoes an Artaudian theme, the repudiation of consensually determined limits, just as this language of an impossible absent book recalls his own description of Artaud's work. But before examining the deployment of Artaud's work in Histoire de la folie it may be instructive to return to Gouhier's question to ask what does Foucault mean by this phrase and why is it that Foucault links madness and the work with such insistence and therefore why, apart from the obvious contextual determinants, is the madness of Artaud invoked and not simply his life or that aspect of his experience which was irreducible to a discussion of his work?
Firstly, for the sake of clarity, the possible interpretations of "la folie... is the absence of the oeuvre" could be listed as follows:
1) that la folie and the oeuvre are de jure incommensurate or at least mutually exclusive. The thrust of Foucault's arguments is to make it impossible to determine whether or not this incommensurability also persists de facto. However the possibility that this is the case is not entirely repudiated.
2) the potential of la folie in general to dissolve the structures upon which the concept of the oeuvre is founded, since its objects are transitory, endlessly metamorphose and actively erode meaning.
3) that therefore a so called 'mad' writer or artist is in general not capable of a systematic and structured work based on "institutionalised rationalism" and that such a work would remain absent with respect to a given mad writer or artist's production seen as the site of continual displacement of processes rather than the manufacture of products.
4) that this incapacity also designates an experience utterly beyond the parameters of the oeuvre which is irrelevant to la folie as a limit experience.
5) Foucault may have had in mind certain such experiences where no works were produced at all. For example, the case of his one time friend at the Ecole Normale Superièure, Jacques Martin who suffered from severe depression and despite a brilliant mind left behind no recognised oeuvre when he suicided in 1963. The biographer David Macey says that Martin the 'philosophe sans oeuvre' represented for Foucault, as well as for Althusser another friend of Martin's, "the mirror of what they could have become. Foucault never spoke of Jacques Martin in print, but, like Althusser, he may have borrowed something from him. From 1961 onwards he would define madness as l'absence d'oeuvre."
6) As well as problematising empirical madness Foucault's aim is to expand the concept of the oeuvre and to indicate that, as with madness, the work of art is essentially and radically transgressive. Its characteristic trait is rupture, of boundaries, limits, frames. But he also asserts the role of the frame in determining what this limit is that the work must infract. This is why he insists that all achieved works are predicated on those which are unachieved. In short he is asserting the ineluctablility of aesthetic judgments in the practice of determining the status of the oeuvre.
7) Artaud is Foucault's model for these questions largely because Artaud's work repeatedly raises them as its dominant themes.
It is precisely this radical testing of the limits of the oeuvre that Artaud poses throughout his work. In his countless letters, essays and manifestoes as well as his art works with their cigarette burns in the paper, Artaud explores the space which cuts the work off from itself and its 'other', and seeks, in part, to exhume their primordial unity. However although Artaud's oeuvre corresponds to everything that Foucault wants to say about the resistance of la folie and the work to closure, Foucault's treatment of that oeuvre opens his work in Histoire de la folie to the kinds of critique that it seeks everywhere to head off. Affirmed then denied and misplaced, the oeuvre of Artaud is abolished and reinvented by Foucault to indicate both the precariousness of its existence in the world and the incisiveness of its protest against that world as well as, more generally, to show that at the heart of the very notion of the oeuvre is the always potential non-oeuvre which it is the task of that madness of language, without ground or limit, to bring into being.
1. Foucault's folie
In Foucault's original preface to Histoire de la folie à l'age classique, he characterises la folie for the first time as "Rien d'autre sans doute que l'absence d'oeuvre".(HF v) La folie: madness, but also a word covering a range of meanings from slight eccentricity to clinical insanity. It is here situated in a relation to oeuvre: work, product, work of art, body of work. Histoire de la folie is, at least in part, the history of this relation and its formulation in this phrase which, in its different modalities, moves through Foucault's various histoires de la folie clearing a space in which la folie can be conceptualised without confining it.
The history begins, appropriately, after the book itself when Henri Gouhier, the head of the jury which in May 1961 heard Foucault's defence of his doctoral thesis Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'age classique, which comprised the text of the first of the three different French publications of this work, said that he didn't understand what Foucault meant by defining la folie as l'absence d'oeuvre. Foucault's detailed replies can be read in his essays Le Non du père of 1962 and La Folie, l'absence d'oeuvre of 1964. In these texts Foucault demarcates the series of historical discontinuities that established the necessity of the link between the oeuvre and an understanding of the place of madness. Yet later, in the revised preface to the 1972 edition of Histoire de la folie, Foucault attempts to play down the significance of his phrase as a formulation given "un peu a l'aveugle" (somewhat unwittingly or blindly). (HF 8) Shoshana Felman has noted that in the French translation of Hegel's Encyclopoedia, the entry under "la folie" says that "blindness is the distinctive characteristic of madness". Perhaps in this later preface to his book we are reading Foucault's ironic acknowledgement that defining madness is itself a mad gesture, though not quite an acknowlegement that, as Derrida characterises it, his entire project in Histoire de la folie is mad.
In Derrida's notorious encounter with this text the phrase is "une note de base" (a fundamental motif)(C 83 tr.54) in Foucault's book. This is perhaps because he recognises its centrality to the problematical project of a history of madness and also perhaps because a certain interpretation of it neatly fits his arguments since if the absence of the oeuvre signifies "the lack of any conventionally determined structure", syntactical, narratological, aesthetic etc. "it implies that madness is both de jure and de facto excluded from Descartes' text, and from Foucault's writing about madness, both of which are inevitably bound up with 'Reason in general'."
It is a phrase which thereby threatens to conceptually undermine Foucault's entire project simply because it is a formulation of madness, a gesture of confinement. Yet the foreclosure of the project would depend on an epistemologically closed position, an absolute determination, of which this phrase constitutes only a possible and, as I will argue, inverse embodiment. It is not a blithe positivistic gesture but a negative lyrical framing which, however, with respect to at least one of its subjects, ironically serves to exclude a project which it had been the work of the book (Histoire de la folie) to re-insert into history. This 'fundamental motif' of the book reappears at its end as the structuring principle of a certain radical discursive practice, linking the themes of Histoire de la folie with the work of one of its central figures: Antonin Artaud.
Derrida's assertion of the fundamental importance of this phrase to Foucault's book is given some justification in the original preface to the 1961 publication of Histoire de la folie in which Foucault links the absence of the oeuvre to the possiblity of history itself and therefore to the production of Foucault's own oeuvre, "." (the great oeuvre of the history of the world is ineradicably accompanied by an absence of the oeuvre).(HF vi) This is based on Foucault's earlier assertion that "." (the relation of reason to unreason constitutes for Western culture one of the dimensions of its originality, it went with it well before Jerome Bosch, and will long survive Nietzsche and Artaud." (HF iii) This is the first mention of Artaud in the book and one in which he is introduced as an index of the density of the relation of reason to unreason, their proximity as well as their historical incommensurability. With Nietzsche, the name of Artaud becomes a marker in the passage of Western history which should have never appeared if his madness had silenced him as effectively as Foucault and Derrida tell us.
It is here in what Foucault calls "ce simple problème d'élocution" (this simple problem of elocution) (ibid) this intransmissibility of madness in language that we read his desire to produce an oeuvre which must remain absent, for there is no language with which to " (bring to the surface of the language of reason a division and a debate which must necessarily remain below, since this language only makes sense above and beyond them).(ibid) There is no language for the experience of la folie for it would have to be "." (sufficiently open to allow the decisive words by which the truth of la folie and reason are constituted for us to inscribe themselves there without betrayal). (ibid) The dream of madness in which the ratio wakes to find itself unharmed but none the wiser is one which continually interrupts Foucault's work, just as it haunted both Descartes' and Derrida's.
Foucault's rhythmical reiteration of the impossibility of the very book which follows this preface would seem to be a kind of textual abreacting by which responses to its propositions are anticipated and included within those propositions themselves. This strategy is, as has already been noted, everywhere evident in Artaud's oeuvre. It is his dominant stylistic method which Foucault also employs to short-circuit critical receptions based on the critique of a given position. All positions in Foucault and Artaud are contingent and polemical. Foucault's call for a new language also echoes an Artaudian theme, the repudiation of consensually determined limits, just as this language of an impossible absent book recalls his own description of Artaud's work. But before examining the deployment of Artaud's work in Histoire de la folie it may be instructive to return to Gouhier's question to ask what does Foucault mean by this phrase and why is it that Foucault links madness and the work with such insistence and therefore why, apart from the obvious contextual determinants, is the madness of Artaud invoked and not simply his life or that aspect of his experience which was irreducible to a discussion of his work?
Firstly, for the sake of clarity, the possible interpretations of "la folie... is the absence of the oeuvre" could be listed as follows:
1) that la folie and the oeuvre are de jure incommensurate or at least mutually exclusive. The thrust of Foucault's arguments is to make it impossible to determine whether or not this incommensurability also persists de facto. However the possibility that this is the case is not entirely repudiated.
2) the potential of la folie in general to dissolve the structures upon which the concept of the oeuvre is founded, since its objects are transitory, endlessly metamorphose and actively erode meaning.
3) that therefore a so called 'mad' writer or artist is in general not capable of a systematic and structured work based on "institutionalised rationalism" and that such a work would remain absent with respect to a given mad writer or artist's production seen as the site of continual displacement of processes rather than the manufacture of products.
4) that this incapacity also designates an experience utterly beyond the parameters of the oeuvre which is irrelevant to la folie as a limit experience.
5) Foucault may have had in mind certain such experiences where no works were produced at all. For example, the case of his one time friend at the Ecole Normale Superièure, Jacques Martin who suffered from severe depression and despite a brilliant mind left behind no recognised oeuvre when he suicided in 1963. The biographer David Macey says that Martin the 'philosophe sans oeuvre' represented for Foucault, as well as for Althusser another friend of Martin's, "the mirror of what they could have become. Foucault never spoke of Jacques Martin in print, but, like Althusser, he may have borrowed something from him. From 1961 onwards he would define madness as l'absence d'oeuvre."
6) As well as problematising empirical madness Foucault's aim is to expand the concept of the oeuvre and to indicate that, as with madness, the work of art is essentially and radically transgressive. Its characteristic trait is rupture, of boundaries, limits, frames. But he also asserts the role of the frame in determining what this limit is that the work must infract. This is why he insists that all achieved works are predicated on those which are unachieved. In short he is asserting the ineluctablility of aesthetic judgments in the practice of determining the status of the oeuvre.
7) Artaud is Foucault's model for these questions largely because Artaud's work repeatedly raises them as its dominant themes.
It is precisely this radical testing of the limits of the oeuvre that Artaud poses throughout his work. In his countless letters, essays and manifestoes as well as his art works with their cigarette burns in the paper, Artaud explores the space which cuts the work off from itself and its 'other', and seeks, in part, to exhume their primordial unity. However although Artaud's oeuvre corresponds to everything that Foucault wants to say about the resistance of la folie and the work to closure, Foucault's treatment of that oeuvre opens his work in Histoire de la folie to the kinds of critique that it seeks everywhere to head off. Affirmed then denied and misplaced, the oeuvre of Artaud is abolished and reinvented by Foucault to indicate both the precariousness of its existence in the world and the incisiveness of its protest against that world as well as, more generally, to show that at the heart of the very notion of the oeuvre is the always potential non-oeuvre which it is the task of that madness of language, without ground or limit, to bring into being.
Tuesday, 16 October 2007
Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu
Monday, 15 October 2007
Module Outline 2007
School of Theatre, Performance and Cultural Policy Studies
Aspects of Theatre & Performance
Autumn Term Module 2007
THEATRE AND THEORY AFTER ARTAUD
Convenor: Dr. Edward Scheer (e.scheer@warwick.ac.uk)
Timetable and Room: Wed 11.30-1.30 F25 Millburn
Introduction
This module provides students with an account of the effects of Antonin Artaud’s writings on contemporary performance practice and its theorisation. Artaud’s writing on the theatre constitutes only a fraction of his total output but its influence has been immense. This module analyses Artaud’s life and work and examines his legacy across the disciplines which comprise contemporary performance: theatre, cinema, radio/sound arts and other cultural media. We will study examples of his own film and stage performances, his various approaches to the text and the image, and some of the key theoretical and performance texts which have responded to his provocations including the work of figures such as Grotowski, and Hijikata and post-structuralist writers such as Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze. Artaud’s challenge to theatre constitutes one of the essential paradoxes of modernism: how to break out of representation and embrace the Real (the world, life etc) while remaining within the realm of the aesthetic? This question requires us to interrogate theatre at its limits.
Course Outline
Week 1 Introduction to Artaud’s life and cultural context with regard to Surrealist approaches to representation.
Suggested Reading:
- Georges Bataille, from ‘Writings on Surrealism’ (Chapter 3 Antonin Artaud. A Critical Reader)
- André Breton & André Parinaud, from Conversations: the Autobiography of Surrealism (Chapters 1 and 2 Antonin Artaud. A Critical Reader)
Week 2 Artaud’s cinema roles as the basis of a paradigm for acting. Screening of scenes from ‘Napoleon’ (dir. Abel Gance 1926) ‘La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc’ (dir. Carl Dreyer 1927) ‘My Life and Times With Antonin Artaud’ (dir Gerard Mordillat 1996).
Required Reading:
-Francis Vanoye ‘Cinemas of Cruelty?’ (Chapter 20 Antonin Artaud. A Critical Reader)
- Daryl Chin, ‘The Antonin Artaud Film Project’, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art - PAJ 56 (Volume 19, Number 2), May 1997, pp. 23-28
Week 3 The theatre essays, the 1930s and his development of an aesthetics of rigour and necessity. Artaud on stage. Performing cruelty.
Required Reading:
-Antonin Artaud, ‘The Theatre of Cruelty (First manifesto)’ and ‘No more masterpieces’ from The Theatre and Its Double
- Susan Sontag, from ‘Approaching Artaud’ (Chapter 11 Antonin Artaud. A Critical Reader)
- Gautam Dasgupta, ‘Remembering Artaud’ PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art - PAJ 56 (Volume 19, Number 2), May 1997, pp. 1-5
Week 4 Madness and cruelty. Artaud’s experiences of madness. Artaud on Van Gogh, Artaud as van Gogh. Foucaults’s theories of madness as the absence of the work of art. The theatre as work of madness.
Required Reading:
- E. Scheer, ‘Foucault/Artaud: the madness of the oeuvre’
- Sylvère Lotringer, Interview with Latremolière (Chapter 4 Antonin Artaud. A Critical Reader)
- Antonin Artaud, ‘Van Gogh the Suicide of Society’
Week 5 Performing the impossible body. The radio works. Reading ‘To have done with the Judgement of god.’ What is the body without organs? Deleuze on Artaud.
Required Reading:
- Antonin Artaud, To have done with the judgement of god
- Allen S. Weiss, ‘K’ (Chapter 17 Antonin Artaud. A Critical Reader)
- Rex Butler, ‘Non-genital thought’, 100 Years of Cruelty, pp. 23 - 57
Week 6 Reading week
Week 7 Performance, violence and convulsive aesthetics.
Screening: Performance film by Nic Roeg and Donald Cammell, Warner Brothers 1970. Cast: James Fox, Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg
Required Reading:
Colin MacCabe, from Performance BFI Film Classics Series London : British Film Institute, 1998.
Week 8 Artaud and the Visual arts. Interpreting Artaud’s drawings in terms of his theories of the image. Outsider art and the performance of the image. Derrida’s Artaud.
Required Reading:
- Jacques Derrida, from ‘To unsense the subjectile’ (Chapter 15 Antonin Artaud. A Critical Reader)
- E. Scheer ‘Sketches of the jet’ 100 Years of Cruelty: Essays on Artaud ed. Edward Scheer. Sydney: Power Publications and Artspace (2000)
Week 9 Artaud’s legacy Part 1. The limits of theatre, Doing Artaud: the failure of the 1964 RSC season of cruelty. Grotowski on Artaud.
Required Reading:
- J. Derrida, from ‘The theatre of cruelty and the closure of representation.’ (Chapter 6 Antonin Artaud. A Critical Reader)
- J. Grotowski, ‘He wasn’t entirely himself’ (Chapter 8 Antonin Artaud. A Critical Reader)
- Clive Barker, ‘Tell Me When It Hurts: The ‘Theatre Of Cruelty’ Season 30 Years On’ NTQ 46. (May 1996)
Week 10 Artaud’s legacy Part 2. Contemporary physical theatre, butoh as dance of cruelty. Is authenticity possible in theatre? Introduction to performance art. Performance art history from Joseph Beuys and Shamanism to Viennese Actionism.
- Helga Finter, from ‘Antonin Artaud and the Impossible Theatre. The Legacy of the Theatre of Cruelty’ (Chapter 7 Antonin Artaud. A Critical Reader)
- Kurihara, Nanako ‘Hijikata Tatsumi: The Words of Butoh’ TDR: The Drama Review - Volume 44, Number 1 (T 165), Spring 2000, pp. 10-28
- Lynn MacRitchie, ‘Marina Abramovic: Exchanging Energies’ Performance Research #1.2 Routledge,1996: 27-34.
- Tanya Augsburg, ‘Orlan’s Performative Transformations of Subjectivity’ in P. Phelan and J. lane eds. The Ends of Performance, New York and London: NYU Press, 1998: 285-326
- Orlan, ‘Intervention’ in P. Phelan and J. lane eds. The Ends of Performance, New York and London: NYU Press, 1998: 315-327.
- ‘Breaking Through Language’ an interview with Mike Parr, Edward Scheer and Nick Tsoutas 100 Years of Cruelty: Essays on Artaud ed. Edward Scheer. Sydney: Power Publications and Artspace (2000)
ASSESSMENT: There are three components of assessment:
(1) Exam (40%).
(2) Essay (40%) An essay of approximately 3000 words. Topics to be announced. Due Monday 14th January 2008 (Week 2, Spring Term)
(3) Class/blog participation (20%). This grade assesses contribution to the subject in terms of levels of preparedness and approach to activities and discussions. It includes the quality and cogency of blog postings.
Essential Reading
Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double . trans. Mary Caroline Richards, New York: Grove Press, 1958. See also the two anthologies Artaud Anthology. San Fransisco: City Lights Books, 1965; and Susan Sontag ed. Antonin Artaud Selected Writings. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976.
Stephen Barber, Antonin Artaud: Blows and Bombs. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1993.
Clive Barker, ‘Tell Me When It Hurts: The ‘Theatre Of Cruelty’ Season 30 Years On’
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge, 1978.
Elin Diamond, ‘The shudder of catharsis in twentieth century performance’ in Performativity and Performance, Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick eds, Routledge New York and London, 1995. 152-172
Martin Esslin, Artaud. London: John Calder, 1976.
Michel Foucault, "Preface to transgression." Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. In Language, Counter Memory, Practice. 29 52.
Foucault, ‘Conclusion’ Madness and Civilization. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Random House, 1965.
Jane Goodall, Artaud and the Gnostic Drama. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.
Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a poor theatre, trans. M. Buszewicz and J. Barba, London, Methuen, 1968.
Edward Scheer ed. 100 Years of Cruelty: essays on Artaud Sydney: Power Publications and Artspace (2000)
Edward Scheer. Ed. Antonin Artaud. A Critical Reader (London and New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis, 2004).
Allen S. Weiss, The Aesthetics of Excess. Albany: SUNY Press, 1989.
Aspects of Theatre & Performance
Autumn Term Module 2007
THEATRE AND THEORY AFTER ARTAUD
Convenor: Dr. Edward Scheer (e.scheer@warwick.ac.uk)
Timetable and Room: Wed 11.30-1.30 F25 Millburn
Introduction
This module provides students with an account of the effects of Antonin Artaud’s writings on contemporary performance practice and its theorisation. Artaud’s writing on the theatre constitutes only a fraction of his total output but its influence has been immense. This module analyses Artaud’s life and work and examines his legacy across the disciplines which comprise contemporary performance: theatre, cinema, radio/sound arts and other cultural media. We will study examples of his own film and stage performances, his various approaches to the text and the image, and some of the key theoretical and performance texts which have responded to his provocations including the work of figures such as Grotowski, and Hijikata and post-structuralist writers such as Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze. Artaud’s challenge to theatre constitutes one of the essential paradoxes of modernism: how to break out of representation and embrace the Real (the world, life etc) while remaining within the realm of the aesthetic? This question requires us to interrogate theatre at its limits.
Course Outline
Week 1 Introduction to Artaud’s life and cultural context with regard to Surrealist approaches to representation.
Suggested Reading:
- Georges Bataille, from ‘Writings on Surrealism’ (Chapter 3 Antonin Artaud. A Critical Reader)
- André Breton & André Parinaud, from Conversations: the Autobiography of Surrealism (Chapters 1 and 2 Antonin Artaud. A Critical Reader)
Week 2 Artaud’s cinema roles as the basis of a paradigm for acting. Screening of scenes from ‘Napoleon’ (dir. Abel Gance 1926) ‘La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc’ (dir. Carl Dreyer 1927) ‘My Life and Times With Antonin Artaud’ (dir Gerard Mordillat 1996).
Required Reading:
-Francis Vanoye ‘Cinemas of Cruelty?’ (Chapter 20 Antonin Artaud. A Critical Reader)
- Daryl Chin, ‘The Antonin Artaud Film Project’, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art - PAJ 56 (Volume 19, Number 2), May 1997, pp. 23-28
Week 3 The theatre essays, the 1930s and his development of an aesthetics of rigour and necessity. Artaud on stage. Performing cruelty.
Required Reading:
-Antonin Artaud, ‘The Theatre of Cruelty (First manifesto)’ and ‘No more masterpieces’ from The Theatre and Its Double
- Susan Sontag, from ‘Approaching Artaud’ (Chapter 11 Antonin Artaud. A Critical Reader)
- Gautam Dasgupta, ‘Remembering Artaud’ PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art - PAJ 56 (Volume 19, Number 2), May 1997, pp. 1-5
Week 4 Madness and cruelty. Artaud’s experiences of madness. Artaud on Van Gogh, Artaud as van Gogh. Foucaults’s theories of madness as the absence of the work of art. The theatre as work of madness.
Required Reading:
- E. Scheer, ‘Foucault/Artaud: the madness of the oeuvre’
- Sylvère Lotringer, Interview with Latremolière (Chapter 4 Antonin Artaud. A Critical Reader)
- Antonin Artaud, ‘Van Gogh the Suicide of Society’
Week 5 Performing the impossible body. The radio works. Reading ‘To have done with the Judgement of god.’ What is the body without organs? Deleuze on Artaud.
Required Reading:
- Antonin Artaud, To have done with the judgement of god
- Allen S. Weiss, ‘K’ (Chapter 17 Antonin Artaud. A Critical Reader)
- Rex Butler, ‘Non-genital thought’, 100 Years of Cruelty, pp. 23 - 57
Week 6 Reading week
Week 7 Performance, violence and convulsive aesthetics.
Screening: Performance film by Nic Roeg and Donald Cammell, Warner Brothers 1970. Cast: James Fox, Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg
Required Reading:
Colin MacCabe, from Performance BFI Film Classics Series London : British Film Institute, 1998.
Week 8 Artaud and the Visual arts. Interpreting Artaud’s drawings in terms of his theories of the image. Outsider art and the performance of the image. Derrida’s Artaud.
Required Reading:
- Jacques Derrida, from ‘To unsense the subjectile’ (Chapter 15 Antonin Artaud. A Critical Reader)
- E. Scheer ‘Sketches of the jet’ 100 Years of Cruelty: Essays on Artaud ed. Edward Scheer. Sydney: Power Publications and Artspace (2000)
Week 9 Artaud’s legacy Part 1. The limits of theatre, Doing Artaud: the failure of the 1964 RSC season of cruelty. Grotowski on Artaud.
Required Reading:
- J. Derrida, from ‘The theatre of cruelty and the closure of representation.’ (Chapter 6 Antonin Artaud. A Critical Reader)
- J. Grotowski, ‘He wasn’t entirely himself’ (Chapter 8 Antonin Artaud. A Critical Reader)
- Clive Barker, ‘Tell Me When It Hurts: The ‘Theatre Of Cruelty’ Season 30 Years On’ NTQ 46. (May 1996)
Week 10 Artaud’s legacy Part 2. Contemporary physical theatre, butoh as dance of cruelty. Is authenticity possible in theatre? Introduction to performance art. Performance art history from Joseph Beuys and Shamanism to Viennese Actionism.
- Helga Finter, from ‘Antonin Artaud and the Impossible Theatre. The Legacy of the Theatre of Cruelty’ (Chapter 7 Antonin Artaud. A Critical Reader)
- Kurihara, Nanako ‘Hijikata Tatsumi: The Words of Butoh’ TDR: The Drama Review - Volume 44, Number 1 (T 165), Spring 2000, pp. 10-28
- Lynn MacRitchie, ‘Marina Abramovic: Exchanging Energies’ Performance Research #1.2 Routledge,1996: 27-34.
- Tanya Augsburg, ‘Orlan’s Performative Transformations of Subjectivity’ in P. Phelan and J. lane eds. The Ends of Performance, New York and London: NYU Press, 1998: 285-326
- Orlan, ‘Intervention’ in P. Phelan and J. lane eds. The Ends of Performance, New York and London: NYU Press, 1998: 315-327.
- ‘Breaking Through Language’ an interview with Mike Parr, Edward Scheer and Nick Tsoutas 100 Years of Cruelty: Essays on Artaud ed. Edward Scheer. Sydney: Power Publications and Artspace (2000)
ASSESSMENT: There are three components of assessment:
(1) Exam (40%).
(2) Essay (40%) An essay of approximately 3000 words. Topics to be announced. Due Monday 14th January 2008 (Week 2, Spring Term)
(3) Class/blog participation (20%). This grade assesses contribution to the subject in terms of levels of preparedness and approach to activities and discussions. It includes the quality and cogency of blog postings.
Essential Reading
Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double . trans. Mary Caroline Richards, New York: Grove Press, 1958. See also the two anthologies Artaud Anthology. San Fransisco: City Lights Books, 1965; and Susan Sontag ed. Antonin Artaud Selected Writings. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976.
Stephen Barber, Antonin Artaud: Blows and Bombs. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1993.
Clive Barker, ‘Tell Me When It Hurts: The ‘Theatre Of Cruelty’ Season 30 Years On’
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge, 1978.
Elin Diamond, ‘The shudder of catharsis in twentieth century performance’ in Performativity and Performance, Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick eds, Routledge New York and London, 1995. 152-172
Martin Esslin, Artaud. London: John Calder, 1976.
Michel Foucault, "Preface to transgression." Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. In Language, Counter Memory, Practice. 29 52.
Foucault, ‘Conclusion’ Madness and Civilization. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Random House, 1965.
Jane Goodall, Artaud and the Gnostic Drama. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.
Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a poor theatre, trans. M. Buszewicz and J. Barba, London, Methuen, 1968.
Edward Scheer ed. 100 Years of Cruelty: essays on Artaud Sydney: Power Publications and Artspace (2000)
Edward Scheer. Ed. Antonin Artaud. A Critical Reader (London and New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis, 2004).
Allen S. Weiss, The Aesthetics of Excess. Albany: SUNY Press, 1989.
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