Tuesday 17th February 2015

Theatre of cruelty (what it is )

Theatre of cruelty was created by Aratud. theatre should represent reality and that it should have an effect over the audience. Artaud created Theatre of cruelty because he was very interested in having
Describe your piece and how it links to Artaud theatre of cruelty in Eastern theatre. He really admired the Balinese dance and performance which is partly why Artaud created theatre of cruelty. He wanted to passion and a convulsive conception of life restored back to theatre.

He included violence and rigour and also extreme conducted because he wanted the audience to be aware of what they were watching. Artaud included things such exaggerating the lighting , making the audience feel uncomfortable and also exaggerating sound which created disturbance. Aratud had his own interpretation of cruelty.

He thought of it as a way to shatter false reality. He believed that text had been an oppressive ruler advocated. Artaud referred theatre as being a vortex. This because he wanted the audience to feel like they were in a different world as soon as they step into the theatre making them feel trapped and powerless.

We began the lesson by getting into groups of four. We had to come up with our own type of theatre of cruelty using Artaud's techniques. My group included Nadine Matthew and Eleanor. Last week in the these groups we discussed different types of nightmares that we've had. We noticed that in each one of our nightmares the similarities were that we all had the colour black present in each of our nightmares. We realised that the colour black can bring all types of feelings and moods towards a person. For example making them feel confused and also making them feel like nothing is there and everything is empty and that they are all alone.

We decided to use this by closing the windows and rolling the blinds making the room dark as possible. Adding on to this we decide to have background music. We realised that creating a very deep suspense can also make someone feel scared and confused because they are left not knowing what's going to happen next. We didn't have any costume but we all had black bomber jackets and we used white po-stick notes to cover our mouths .

 We did this because we wanted hide our identity as possible and we wanted  the people in our class to think that we were totally different people.
Before we could begin this we started off by sending everyone outside. This is was also linked to my group and I building a very deep suspense because my classmates were very confused because they didn't know what was going on. We tried to hide ourselves as much as we could.

 Eleanor crouched behind the door so that nobody could see her when she opened it. As my classmates came in the door creaked open and the background music was playing. They came in very slowly which was great for my group and because it showed that we really had an effect over them.


After they all came in Eleanor slammed the door which signified that they were all trapped and there was no way out. We jumped, grabbed,pushed,pulled,and even and made different types of sounds that made them feel uncomfortable. I'd my weakness was trying to make sounds whilst having the po-stick note stuck on my mouth because it was really hard to get the sound out.

As we continued our piece we then pushed everyone one to the middle making sure they were in a tight circle. We ran around them twice and as we did this I could hear the reactions from my classmates and I could tell that they were really scared by mumbling to themselves that they did not want to be there any-more. After running around a couple of times we then stopped and stared directly into their eyes and did this for thirty seconds.

At this point in time there was nothing but silence. This linked to the fact that silence can also be apart of a nightmare and also make someone feel scared by them being confused of what will happen next. We then ripped off the po-stick notes from our mouths and then screamed loudly in unison. This really effected our classmates because the scream was used as a shock making them aware of what was happening around them Also made them scared and some of them felt really out of their comfort zone.