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O Teatro Segundo Artaud
O Teatro Segundo Artaud
ARTAUD OU A
REINVENO DO CORPO
ANDR LAGE
Prlogo crueldade
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tudo, vital - intimamente ligada ao prprio princpio da vida:"Tudo que age uma crueldade. Disse
crueldade como poderia ter dito vida"1 .
Uma vez apreendido o principal sentido
que Artaud atribui crueldade, uma questo permanece em suspenso: possvel a prtica desse
teatro? Ou estaria ele confinado ao estatuto de um
teatro irrealizvel? No texto O teatro da crueldade
e o fechamento da representao, Jacques
Derrida desenvolve a tese sobre a impossibilidade
de ser fiel a Artaud e enumera, metodicamente, as
formas do teatro contemporneo que so indiscu-
A esttica artaudiana:
El Hombre de Arena El Perifrico
de Objetos/Argentina/1998
(Foto: Kika Antunes)
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O Teatro Balins
(Foto: Guy Delahaye)
gestos - esquemas. Descoberta que foi determinante, pois este teatro puro, este teatro sagrado, ritual e mgico, como diz Artaud, desencadeou reaes fecundas, permitindo-lhe ir ainda
mais longe nas suas reflexes sobre o teatro como
uma nova linguagem fsica baseada nos signos, e
no mais nas palavras, cuja tendncia metafsica
se ope ao teatro ocidental, de tendncias psicolgicas. Alm da idia de teatro como intensa
liberao de signos, o teatro balins mostra-lhe
que o domnio do teatro no o texto, mas o
espao: O espao da cena utilizado em todas as
suas direes e, por assim dizer, em todos os
planos possveis.
Tal como o quadro de Lucas van den
Leyden, As Filhas de Loth, os balineses lhe oferecem o exemplo de uma poesia no espao que se
dirige imediatamente aos sentidos, e no ao intelecto, como a linguagem da palavra. Poesia no
espao que dissolve e mistura, sem hierarquizar,
os meios de expresso da dana, do canto, da pantomima e da msica. Poesia no espao que se
manifesta tambm no prprio corpo dos atores,
que se tornam verdadeiros hierglifos animados.
O corpo do ator balins um corpo-hierglifo, um
corpo que capta foras e as transforma em signo.
Corpo magnificamente desarticulado, que ultrapassa os limites das articulaes anatmicas, que
materializa uma srie de jogos de dissonncia e de
ressonncia, que esculpe linhas de intensidade e
centros de vibrao: corpo-msica, corpo-ritmo,
corpo-som, corpo-impessoal, e que fala uma lngua cuja gramtica feita por gestos e mmicas,
mas tambm pelo poder evocador de um ritmo,
pela qualidade musical de um movimento fsico,
pelo acorde paralelo e admiravelmente fundido de
um tom9.
O teatro do sopro e do grito
Dos primeiros escritos do Teatro Alfred
Jarry aos textos do Teatro e seu duplo, passando
pelo fracasso das representaes dos Cenci - pea
que correspondia sua definio da crueldade - e
pela sua viagem ao Mxico no incio de 1936,
Artaud elabora o essencial de suas teorias teatrais
e , sem dvida, uma referncia obrigatria para
mos, proferindo em cadncia uma melodia improvisada, uma sinfonia de vibraes sonoras. Esse
jogo com a sonoridade das frases escandidas, esse
sopro portador de golpes, essa energia singular
que ele conseguia extrair de seu corpo, essas inacreditveis variaes de altura e de timbre que ele
obtinha com a sua voz, essa intensidade de gritos
minuciosamente controlados, tudo isso era confundido pelos mdicos do hospital psiquitrico
com delrio desenfreado, histeria verborrgica,
alienao mental. Tais mdicos desconheciam que
O Teatro Balins
(Foto: Guy Delahaye)
68
op. cit.
A prologue to cruelty
A cursed poet, the maximum incarnation of
romantic genius potency, a beat generation prophet, a
spokesperson for the anti-psychiatric movement, theoretician of the Theater of Cruelty, an illuminated actor, revolted and crazy, Antonin Artaud is one of the most important
references by critical thinking and contemporary artistic
creation. His work has fascinated several generations and
has not stopped fascinating us, both for its complexity and
for the considerable impact that it has had and still has on
contemporary thinking. Revolutionary and innovative, it
marked a generation of actors and theater directors (Julien
Beck, Judith Malina, Tadeusz Kantor, Peter Brook, Robert
Wilson) and contributed for the formation of the critical
thinking of great French philosophers from the twentieth
century (Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Michel
Foucault, Gilles Deleuze). Hybrid and multifaceted, his work
occupies a radically singular position: in the intersection of
literature, drawing, theater, cinema and radio.
2008 is the year when the 60th anniversary of
Antonin Artaud's death year is celebrated (1896-1948). The
Festival Internacional de Teatro Palco & Rua de Belo
Horizonte, with this article, pays a little homage to the theater-man who Artaud was and to his theory of the Theater
of Cruelty, many times misunderstood, tortured, distracted
for being confused with a theater of blood, that exposes
organs, screaming, physical disease, tumult and sadism.
Cruelty is not a synonymous of shed blood, mortified flesh,
crucified enemy. That identification to torture is a very
small aspect of the question, Artaud states. In many texts
of Theater and its double (1938) he tries to explain what he
thinks cruelty is all about, conceiving it not in the episodic, accessory sense, for sadistic and perverse taste of spirit, for the love of strange feelings and perverse attitudes,
but in the sense of life appetite, of implacable rigor, in the
Gnostic sense of the whirl of life that devours the darkness. The cruelty in question is not physical or moral.
Before anything it is vital - closely connected to the life
principle itself: All that acts is a cruelty. I said cruelty as I
could have said life"1.
Once the main sense Artaud attributes to cruelty
is apprehended, a question remains: is it possible to practice this theater? Or would it be confined to the statute of an
unrealizable theater? In the text The theater of cruelty and
the closure of representation, Jacques Derrida develops
the thesis about the impossibility of being loyal to Artaud
and methodically numbers the forms of contemporary theater which are unquestionably foreign to the Theater of
Cruelty. Little by little all are refused:
1. "all non-holy theater";
2. "all theater that privileges the word, or better, the verb,
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ment provokes (my highlight), which means that he conceives text as a sonorous materiality, a physical energy, a
vocal spatiality, thus releasing it from the tutelage of meaning, the clear ideas, everything that produces sense, message. This new way of access and work with words, the verbal language, the text poetry, he will later develop and theorize in texts such as The letters on language (19321933), An affective athletics (1935) and The Theater of
Sraphin (1935). What interests him is the expansive
value of the words, the breathing, plastic sources of language, words considered not only for what they mean
grammatically speaking but under their sonorous angle
and, mainly, like movements8.
Bali's theater
By lack of enough financial support, Artaud
decides to terminate the Alfred Jarry Theater experience.
But he does not give up his idea of founding a new theater,
and comes into an extremely creative theoretical phase.
From 1931 to 1935 he gives conferences, writes articles,
publishes manifests, produces important mail, constituting
this way a great part of the texts that will compose the
Theater and its double. In late 1931 he discovers the theater
from Bali at the Colonial Exhibition and gets unquestionably
fascinated with those short plays in which drama does
not evolve among feelings, but among states of mind, ossified and reduced to gestures - schemes. This was a determining discovery, because this pure theater, this holy
theater, ritualistic and magic, as Artaud says, provoked
fecund reactions and allowed him to go even further in his
reflections about theater as a new physical language
based on signs, not longer on words, whose metaphysical
trend is opposed to the western theater with its psychological trends. Besides the idea of theater as an intense liberation of signs, the Balinese theater shows him that the
theater dominium is not text, but space: The scene space
is used in all its directions and, so to speak, on all possible
plans. Such as the Lucas van den Leyen painting, The
Daughters of Loth, people from Bali give him the example
of a poetry in space that is immediately driven to the senses and not to the intellect, like the language of words.
Poetry in space that dissolves and mixes, without hierarchy,
the means of expression of dance, singing, pantomime and
music. Poetry in space that manifests itself also in the
actors' bodies, which become true animated hieroglyphs.
The body of the Balinese actor is a body-hieroglyph, a body that captures forces and transforms them into
signs. A magnificently disarticulated body, which overcomes the limits of anatomic articulations, materializes a
series of dissonance and resonance games, molds lines of
intensity and vibration centers: body-music, body-rhythm,
body-sound, body-impersonal, and which speaks a language whose grammar is made by gestures and mimic,
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