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The influence of Antonin Artaud on the contemporary theatre has only become evident since the early Sixties, although writers and directors have been directly or indirectly influenced by his thinking and innovations for many years. Today his pre-eminence as a founder of modern theatrical style is rivalled only by Brecht, with whom he has much in common.The man and his work, as Martin Esslin persuasively argues in this perceptive study, are inseparable and must be considered together. Genius or madman, everything about Artaud is fascinating - his extraordinary life, his passions, his wide-ranging interests, the brilliance and originality that he brought to his plays, his productions and his other writings. Artaud died in 1948 at the age of fifty-two, but accomplished a revolution in his short life that is still bearing fruit today.This compact, carefully researched study is an invaluable guide, combining readability with a sympathetic and authoritative study of its subject.
Published here in its entirety in English, Artaud's Revolutionary Messages collects Antonin Artaud's political, aesthetic and philosophical writings during his travels to Mexico in 1936. Written around the same time as his seminal work The Theatre and its Double, it captures a crucial point in Artaud's life shortly before he was admitted to a mental asylum in which he was to spend a significant part of his later life. Revolutionary Messages contains conferences that Artaud gave at the University of Mexico, articles from the daily Mexican newspaper El Nacional Revolucionario and a study of three seminal artists of the time influenced by or from Mexico: Franz Hals, Ortiz Monasterio and Maria Izquierdo. Not only will you gain crucial insight into Artaud's time in Mexico and his vision of a “total revolution,” which he places in distinction to Marxist and Surrealist conceptions of revolution, but you will deepen your understanding of the philosophical roots of his theatrical project, which ultimately shaped modern theatre and dance. The publication includes an introduction by the translator, Joel White, and a preface by Professor of European Philosophy, Howard Caygill.
"I am the man," wrote Artaud, "who has best charted his inmost self." Antonin Artaud was a great poet who, like Poe, Holderlin, and Nerval, wanted to live in the infinite and asked that the human spirit burn in absolute freedom. To society, he was a madman. Artaud, however, was not insane but in luciferian pursuit of what society keeps hidden. The man who wrote Van Gogh the Man Suicided by Society raged against the insanity of social institutions with insight that proves more prescient with every passing year. Today, as Artaud's vatic thunder still crashes above the "larval confusion" he despised, what is most striking in his writings is an extravagant lucidity. This collection gives us quintessential Artaud on the occult, magic, the theater, mind and body, the cosmos, rebellion, and revolution in its deepest sense.
An anthology of criticism on this controversial and brilliant artist from writers including Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Maurice Blanchot, Herbert Blau, Leo Bersani and Susan Sontag.
Contains all Artaud's key writings on theatre, including 'The theatre and its double'.
This book serves as analysis of the aesthetics of materiality in the multifaceted work of Antonin Artaud, one of Twentieth-Century France's most provocative and influential figures, spanning literature, performance, art, cinema, media and critical theory.
Routledge Performance Practitioners is a series of introductory guides to the key theatre-makers of the last century. Each volume explains the background to and the work of one of the major influences on twentieth- and twenty-first-century performance. Antonin Artaud was an active theatre-maker and theorist whose ideas reshaped contemporary approaches to performance. This is the first book to combine an overview of Artaud’s life with a focus on his work as an actor and director; an analysis of his key theories, including the Theatre of Cruelty and the double; a consideration of his work as a director at the Théâtre Alfred Jarry and his production of Strindberg’s A Dream Play; and a series of practical exercises to develop an approach to theatre based on Artaud’s key ideas. As a first step towards critical understanding and as an initial exploration before going on to further, primary research, Routledge Performance Practitioners are unbeatable value for today’s student.
Poet, actor, playwright, surrealist, drug addict, asylum inmate—Antonin Artaud (1896–1949) is one of the twentieth century’s most enigmatic personalities and idiosyncratic thinkers. In this biography, David A. Shafer takes readers on a voyage through Artaud’s life, which he spent amid the company of France’s most influential cultural figures, even as he stood apart from them. Shafer casts Artaud as a person with tenacious values. Even though Artaud was born in the material comfort of a bourgeois family from Marseille, he uncompromisingly rejected bourgeois values and norms. Becoming famous as an actor, director, and author, he would use his position to challenge contemporary assump...