Artaud look at a person, which was formed under the influence of Europe, is going through the crisis of bourgeois humanism, and was very pessimistic. But in a series he created images of people throwing a challenge to the heroic forces of evil, is one of the central places. Here Artaud - heir apparent of the traditional European humanism and for his "Theatre of Cruelty" refusal to submit to these forces is as important as the need to look them straight in the face.
The test is a terrible, perhaps - fatal. For the most Arto it, in any case, it was disastrous. However, the "theater of cruelty", dipping below this level, the limit test for the outcome of which no one can guarantee, immediately becomes a "cruel theater" - something like a horror movie, tickling and benign. This trend is affected with all the force of the followers of Artaud, and flirting with the "underground" and every now and then launches into the counterculture kitsch created particularly favorable conditions for all sorts of speculation on the methods of the "theater of cruelty" and organic temptation for him anti-humanism. The flash of great interest to a "theater of cruelty" Artaud, which coincided with the rise of the youth counterculture, not accidental. As already mentioned, despite the relative prosperity achieved in the Western capitalist countries in the postwar period, at the same time here is rapidly and widely spread feeling of a universal distress, danger and helplessness of man in the face of powerful and unknown forces. This gave rise to a very concrete experience "rock", the same mythological reality on which he wrote Artaud.
However, the specificity of unfolding in the 60s protest movements, their attraction to the irrational, the instinctive principle in man, hatred of reason, characteristic of the counter-culture fascination with magic and the East were so great as anticipated by Artaud, a new aesthetic that was not slow to proclaim him as their a prophet. But for the aesthetics of "theater of cruelty" was the same touchstone, as psychedelic - for the development of counter-culture cult of insanity: to be honest here means to go towards the devastating emotional upheavals and, perhaps, death, the slightest inconsistency makes the daring spirit of a harmless show. The Living Theatre was to embody it in his own biography. In 1966, after leaving the U.S. after a trial related to tax evasion, the troupe traveled to Europe where he initiated a great interest in how their performances and their way of life, because for the Living Theatre, which is already registered in the name itself, to live and be theater meant about the same. Stray existence ("we like to be nomads, gypsies ...ยป), style large family with anarchic freedom of manners, the uniqueness of the training methods, which played an important role yoga, meditation, trance technique, picturesque clothes, the language of mysticism and the" theater of cruelty "- All this attracted a lot of attention to them. All this was a harbinger of an impending wave of the counterculture. During his four-year European "exile" This company, a municipality in the two buses space in France, Switzerland, Italy and Germany, as brothers sharing the work and wages, taking all the decisions together. As we approach the "hot summer" of 1968 it overgrown by a growing number of fans who followed the truck on it, taking over her life style. |