First we read The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower by Jean Cocteau. In this spectacle Coceau was trying to reveal mundane life as absurd. Basically, a wedding party has lunch on the Eiffel Tower, but they are interrupted by hunters hunting ostriches, pompous guests giving speeches and telling tales of their times in Africa, mirages of lions and bathing beauties, and their future offspring, who arrives and massacres the wedding party. Sounds totally mundane, right? Actually, it is hilarious, mostly because of the style of presentation. The story is narrated by two phonographs (people playing phonographs) who say all of the dialogue and explain all of the action in broad declaritory style like carnival barkers or sports casters and the action is presented separately in dance and acrobatic style movement.
After the hilarious romp that is Cocteau, we turned our attention to “Spurt of Blood” by Antonin Artaud. Artaud was also about revealing the absurdity of the lies we tell ourselves, but he went about it in a different way, mostly cause he was crazy as a loon. Artaud could never reconcile his intellectual existence with his physical existence and this struggle is present in everything he wrote. He believed that if he ever truly was able to reconcile his mental state with his physical state he would cease to exist. Artaud also began working during and after WWII and he believed society was ill and theater could be used as a tool to cut out the illnesses of society. He believed that to confront our “illnesses” we had to confront them in our most primitive selves, so his theatrical experiments were designed to force the audience into a state of primitive revelation. This is the idea behind the Theater of Cruelty, that the comfortable space between action on stage and the audience experience of that action had to be ripped away so the audience was forced into introspective confrontation. Spurt of Blood is the archetypal coming of age story. Boy meets girl, boy goes out into world to make his fortune so he can return to girl and live happily ever after. But the boy and the girl’s romance is nothing but a series of shrill repetitions, the boy is met out in the world by a series of bafoonish characters too selfish to give him good advice, and when the hand of God is ready to step in and change things it is rejected by a jaded bawd who condemns it for being absent heretofore. The girl of the boy’s initial desire ends up dead and the world ends in an apocalypse of falling architecture, body parts and scorpions. Ya know, the usual boy meets girl kinda thing. Then we read “Description of A Physical State” one of Artaud’s experiments with automatic writing. It is a dense chunk of text describing the physical sensation of having a body at a moment in time. We would say it is a bad moment, as the description is one of horrifying sensations and pain, but for Artuad, this may have just been another day in the life.
In the physical exercises following the readings we played what we lovingly refer to as the domination game (perhaps Boal gave it this name, I cannot remember now, but it seems like the kind of thing he would do). This is the one where one person leads another person around with the palm of their hand because the follower’s task is to keep their nose four inches from the palm of the leader’s hand. The five person domination machine was beautiful and resulted in the group playing looking alternately like a rapturous cult of hand and foot worshippers, a pack of wolves devouring a victim, and a sea anemone floating gently in rotating currents. I’m not kidding, same exercise, same group of people, all those cool images. These are the moments we live for!
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