Antonin Artaud

Antonin Artaud was a French playwright, actor, essayist and theater director. In the book The theater and his double, Artaud expressed his admiration for the oriental forms of theater. The admiration inspired by the ritualized and codified physicality of Balinese dance inspired the theories set out in the two manifestos of the "Theater of Cruelty". By cruelty he did not mean sadism or pain, but pure catharsis. In order to achieve this, it is necessary to resort to everything that could disturb the sensitivity of the spectator, causing in him an acute sensation of inner discomfort, which makes him live the whole performance with agitation. Artaud believed that the text had ended up exercising a tyranny over the spectacle, and instead pushed for an integral theater, which would include and put on the same level all forms of language, merging gesture, movement, light and word. From 1936 to 1946 he was interned in an asylum