The Evolution of Decor, and: Manifesto in Clear Language

Antonin Artaud The following essays by Antonin Artaud are appearing here for the first time in America. Bettina Knapp, author of Antonin Artaud: A Man of Vision, has provided a brief introduction to the essays for PAJ. -Editors "The Evolution of Decor" (1924) is Antonin Artaud's first manifesto on the theatre. It is a seminal work in which Artaud suggests that modern directors have lost their "capacity for mysticism"-thus draining them of their imaginative powers. He blamed this loss on the fact that directors no longer look within themselves to create a mise en scene and consequently are incapable of experiencing the "purity" of their "initial reactions" and thus restoring "to each theatrical gesture its indispensable human meaning." Rather, they look about them using a logical and rational approach to stage happenings, attaching importance to externals, synthesizing what is already common fare. As a result their work remains confused, derivative, and ephemeral. Directors are no longer qualified to generate what Artaud considered of utmost importance and what he attempted to bring forth in his productions , "a magnetic intercommunication between the spirit of the author and the spirit of the director. " 46 In "Manifesto in Clear Language" (1925) Artaud's ideas are more clearly defined. "Everything that proceeds from reason" is rejected; the rational domain is considered contrived and, therefore, "untrustworthy." Only what arouses the senses, stirs the "flesh," works on the "marrow" is authentic. Theatre should be visceral; it should enable the viewer to undergo a numinous or religious experience. To achieve such a goal Artaud believed that the spectator's reality should be expanded by arousing the explosive and creative forces within his unconscious, an area he considered more powerful than rational consciousness in determining man's actions. Although neither "The Evolution of Decor" nor "Manifesto in Clear Language" made the slightest noise in the theatrical structure of the time, these essays nevertheless are basic to Artaud's future credo and to his two theatrical ventures: the Theater Alfred Jarry (1927) with productions of his own Burned Stomach or Mad Mother, of Roger Vitrac's The Mysteries of Love and Victor, of Strindberg's A Dream Play his Theatre of Cruelty (1935) and a performance of his adaptation of The Cenci. Artaud's innovative ideas, some of which were subsumed in "Evolution of Decor" and in "Manifesto in Clear Language" were formulated most concisely in The Theatre and its Double (1938). His theatrical credo may be expressed briefly in the following manner: a rejection of psychological, literary, and didactic theatre; a return to a theatre of myth (metaphysical theatre) as known to the ancients and orientals; the invention of a new theatrical spatial language (with great importance accorded to gesture, movements, masks, etc.); the pre-eminence of the dream world or unconscious over the logical and rational domains; the intent to touch, stir, shock the spectator for therapeutic reasons by eliciting sharp visceral effects; the use of new breathing techniques by actors as a basis for their portrayals; the role played by the audience as a contributing factor to the dynamism of the spectacle. Artaud's ideas concerning the theatre were violently rejected by his contemporaries . And he remained a man alienated from society, divided within himself, isolated in an indifferent world. His very personal way of thinking, however, created an intellectual and emotional climate; it generated a whole new series of thought and feeling waves which in turn gathered momentum and later became concretized in the theatre of the absurd, of happenings, ridiculous, hysterical, panic and more - all designed to arouse, disturb, and evoke powerful and bizarre sensations within man, visceral reactions capable of transforming or distorting his conceptions of the world and himself. Bettina L. Knapp 47 The Evolution of Decor (1924) We must ignore mise en scene*and the theater. All the great dramatists, the model dramatists, thought outside the theater. Look at Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare. On another level, look at Racine, Corneille, Moliere. The latter eliminate, or almost eliminate, external staging, but they exploit to the utmost the internal movements, that kind of perpetual coming and going in their protagonists' souls. Subservience to the author, dependence on the text, what a dismal tradition...