Antonin Artaud Quotes About Theatre

Quotes about: Theatre

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

  Antonin Artaud

  Order, Break Through, Theatre

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

• The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything - gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness - rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations.... To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre.

  Antonin Artaud

  Light, Order, Break Through

  "The Theatre and Its Double". Book by Antonin Artaud, 1938.

• 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

• 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

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

  Antonin Artaud

  Theatre, Diligence, Cruelty

• Theater of Cruelty means a theater difficult and cruel for myself first of all. And, on the level of performance, it is not the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other’s bodies, carving up our personal anatomies, or, like Assyrian emperors, sending parcels of human ears, noses, or neatly detached nostrils through the mail, but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has been created to teach us that first of all.

  Antonin Artaud

  Fall, Mean, Exercise

  Antonin Artaud (1958). “The Theater and Its Double”, p.79, Grove Press

• It has not been definitively proved that the language of words is the best possible language. And it seems that on the stage, which is above all a space to fill and a place where something happens, the language of words may have to give way before a language of signs whose objective aspect is the one that has the most immediate impact upon us.

  Antonin Artaud

  Impact, Space, Giving

• Like all magic cultures expressed by appropriate hieroglyphs, the true theater has its shadows too, and, of all languages and all arts, the theater is the only one left whose shadows have shattered their limitations.

  Antonin Artaud

  Art, Magic, Shadow

  Antonin Artaud (1958). “The Theater and Its Double”, p.12, Grove Press

• There are those who go to the theatre as they would go to a brothel.

  Antonin Artaud

  Theatre, Brothels

  Antonin Artaud (1999). “Collected Works”, Riverrun Press

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