Antonin Artaud Quotes about Theatre

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To break through language in order to touch life is to create or re-create the theater.

To break through language in order to touch life is to create or re-create the theater.

Order, Break Through, Theatre

Antonin Artaud (1958). “The Theater and Its Double”, p.13, Grove Press

Artaud sought to remove aesthetic distance, bringing the audience into direct contact with the dangers of life. By turning theatre into a place where the spectator is exposed rather than protected, Artaud was committing an act of cruelty upon them.

Antonin Artaud

Distance, Theatre, Danger

Cruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness.

Antonin Artaud

Theatre, Diligence, Cruelty

The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid.

Antonin Artaud

Order, Theatre, Passionate

Antonin Artaud (1958). “The Theater and Its Double”, p.122, Grove Press

Before our eyes is fought a battle of symbols... for there can be theatre only from the moment when the impossible really begins and when the poetry that occurs on the stage sustains and superheats the realized symbols.

Antonin Artaud

Eye, Theatre, Battle