Artaud and His Doubles

Chapter 4 : Theaters for the Masses

chapter 4 : Theaters for the Masses Artaud conceived of his theatrical project in the aftermath of World War I, when feelings of alienation and a deep yearning to belong to something larger than the self organized the social and aesthetic dimensions of much of European mass culture. The change in the relationship between the individual and the community was heralded as both alienating and empowering , atomizing and unifying, and it was manipulated by political systems on both the left and the right. While Marxists explained the rise of the masses in economic terms, fascists looked on it as a biological phenomenon , one that auspiciously heralded the demise of the hated bourgeois individual and the birth of a new communal identity. In the war between the religions of matter and spirit, the Theater of Cruelty, as we will see, is certainly not on the side of the class theorists. It embraces the mass as an organic entity that can bring us closer to an essential spiritual state—a state that materialist concerns had obscured and enfeebled. The history of the Great War combines with the history of the theater in a striking manner when viewed through the lens of the audience. Some saw in the new bourgeois theater and its audience/performer relationship an embodiment of the separation and alienation being experienced across the continent on a wider scale. Developing their aesthetic ideas in opposition to bourgeois theater, they attempted to eliminate that feeling of alienation through what we could best describe as crowd-manipulation techniques, and they did so concurrently with Artaud. The new set of doubles to the Theater of Cruelty revealed in this chapter is the theorists of people’s theaters in interwar fascist Italy and Germany. My approach to these theaters foregrounds their ideals of interaction between the performance and the spectators—specifically, methods that productions attempted to employ to work against individual responses and toward an immersive, communal experience. The Theater of Cruelty’s kinship with the practices of people’s theaters reveals a relation between spectator and performer that succeeded far better in entre-guerre politics than inside the96 ater buildings. While avant-garde theaters were still conceiving of an “audience ,” these theaters, instead, conceived of a “crowd.” People’s theaters make us think about the implications of engineering a crowd in contrast to performing for an audience.1 (We will investigate this concept through the lens of crowd theory in the next chapter.) People’s theaters share common features across countries and decades: they work with myth, archetype, and broad strokes of plot and character. They aim to arouse the passions; they are for “the people” conceived of as a unit. They draw from public festivals and athletic events, and they look a lot like rallies. They attempt to channel the energy of a crowd into a revolution of identity that would occur not on the individual but on the communal level. People’s theaters advocate the dramatic use of essentialized elements of history and the classics; they elevate emotions over dialogue, text, and reason; they emphasize the “real” in terms of bodies in space; and they aspire to engineer, by technical and performative means, a total spectacle. In France, the notion of a théâtre du peuple—a mass performance for and by the people—took hold during the French Revolution, as Robespierre , Jacques-Louis David, Danton, and others developed ideas drawn from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Denis Diderot, and Louis-Sébastien Mercier to promote spectacles such as the Festival of Unity and Indivisibility (1793) that would unite the entire French people. At the turn of the next century, the people’s theater impulse—nationalist, with an anti-elitist bias—became more pacifist and concentrated on cultural decentralization . In 1895, Maurice Pottecher created the first official French Théâtre du Peuple in remote Bussang, performing on a hillside for two thousand spectators. In 1902–3, Romain Rolland advocated a théâtre du peuple drawing from ideals of community celebration and equality he found in Rousseau, the Convention, and Jules Michelet. Firmin Gémier created the Théâtre National Ambulant in 1911–12, which literally brought the theater (a structure of 1,650 seats) on trains and trucks to the non-Parisians of France. In each incarnation, the artists called for performances with thousands of performers and spectators that would establish a collective identity through mythologized history, archetype, and elevated passions. They banked on the feelings of belonging inspired by being in a crowd...