Antonin Artaud
Antonin Artaud
Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, better known as Antonine Artaud, was a French dramatist, poet, essayist, actor, and theatre director, widely recognized as one of the major figures of twentieth-century theatre and the European avant-garde...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth4 September 1896
CountryFrance
moments excuse distinction
Excuse my absolute freedom. I refuse to make a distinction between any of the moments of myself.
suicide morning time
I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat.
distance theatre danger
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.
art ideas leisure
The idea of a detached art, of poetry as a charm which exists only to distract our leisure, is a decadent idea and an unmistakable symptom of our power to castrate.
life understanding facts
When we speak the word 'life,' it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.
believe men doe
We must believe in a sense of life renewed by the theater, a sense of life in which man fearlessly makes himself master of what does not yet exist, and brings it into being. And everything that has not been born can still be brought to life if we are not satisfied to remain mere recording organisms.
people earth delirium
I prefer the people who eat off the bare earth the delirium from which they were born.
order drug absence
It is not opium which makes me work but its absence, and in order for me to feel its absence it must from time to time be present.
insane asylums insane-asylum
There is nothing like an insane asylum for gently incubating death.
actors instinct crude
The actor is merely a crude empiricist, a practitioner guided by vague instinct.
writing pigs people
All writing is garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try and put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs.
order theatre passionate
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.
eye theatre battle
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.
heart men hands
I am a man by virtue of my hands and my feet, my belly, my heart of meat, my stomach whose knots reunite me to the putrefaction of life.