163 Conclusión sobre el apartado de Eficiencia

There is a kind of theatre in which the essential metaphor swerves into something altogether fierier, something which demands that the actor perform virtually as herself. It is closer to performance art, perhaps, or shamanism. Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) called this the ‘theatre of cruelty’; Peter Brook’s name for it was the ‘holy theatre’.

This is a theatre of direct experience, rare but terrifying, for it aims so to scorch its audience with uncontrolled shock, physical pain, true torment as to scour them into purity. It provides a physical experience addressed to the senses rather than the intellect, with the aim of taking its audience through a physical experience to a purity and spirituality beyond. For the actor who must take the spectators on this journey, a ‘performance’ can be extremely painful as well as emotionally draining. Nevertheless, some of the most exhilarating and awe-inspiring performances of the last fifty years or more have come from actors working in this style of theatre.

Artaud himself advocated an end to speech which conveyed rational sense. He wanted his actors to scream, bark, shriek, whisper, howl, groan, he wanted incantation, whistling, sweet harmonies, ‘weird and violent words and. . . wild, piercing, inarticulate cries’ (Martin Esslin, Antonin Artaud, the Man and his Work, London: John Calder, 1976, p. 9). To this end he devised a series of exercises for actors, which emphasised the use of the diaphragm, the chest and the head, first in a series of breathing exercises, then as a springboard for utterance. By mastering breathing, Artaud sug- gested, the actor developed the means to master emotion, and the exercises moved from breathing to shouts and on to rhythm.

Further exercises involved long improvisations, including animal impersonations and also tests of the imagination as actors were asked to be fire or the wind, or to enact a dream, to achieve intensity without premeditation. Out of this would come a new understanding at a visceral level of the ‘language of theatre’, not merely the vocalised shouts, hisses, growls and so on, but also the physicalisation of anguish which Artaud saw as a condition of consciousness. The actor must act with her whole body, and through mime, mimicry, gesture and pose achieve the quality of

dance, using the body itself as the first and crucial hieroglyph of meaning. The actor must therefore be able to slither, stride, stamp, sway without forethought, stretch her arms out or up, or pump them like a marathon runner, wag her head or topple it sideways, flirt, rage, find a frenzy within which to lose herself. The actor embodies secret, almost unknown feelings, desires, drives and fears which can pass unimpeded into the entranced spectator.

Artaud’s prescriptions may seem impossible to follow, and indeed his own record as a practitioner is undeniably weak. But his ideas have inspired some of the most challenging and brilliant performances in the years since his death, in performance art, in pop music concerts, and in more conventional theatrical settings.

The Theatre Laboratory which flourished in Poland in the 1950s and 1960s, led by Jerzy Grotowski (1933–99), considerably extended Artaud’s ideas. Especially in the early 1960s, after years of work, they presented a series of extraordinary productions which depended very largely on the intensity and commitment of the actors. Play- ing deliberately to tiny audiences – they did not admit more than a hundred spectators to a performance – they developed what Gro- towski called a ‘poor theatre’, one which focused on the actor and did away with reliance on huge budgets, multiple props, expensive settings and the like. The audiences at the Theatre Laboratory sat with Faustus round his ‘last supper’ table, or looked down into the room where the Constant Prince was tortured. The actor was asked to ‘open up’, to ‘emerge from himself’: his job was seen as being to offer an invitation to the spectator in ‘an act of love’. Grotowski was extremely keen on actor training, but this meant not so much the acquisition of skills as ways to remove personal obstacles, what he called a ‘via negativa’, to an utterly open performance. If this theatre was therapeutic, its function to ‘integrate’ its spectators’ lives, the actors were seen as priests or healers, who had to understand that they would gain nothing from the experience, but that they would have to give much. At its best, this theatre provided some of the most extraordinary acting performances in Western theatre: Ryszard Cieslak, for instance, in Akropolis, seemed to achieve a state of trance, in which the externalisation of his internal suffering enabled him somehow to become both subject and object of the work.

One of Grotowski’s assistants in the early 1960s was Eugenio Barba (b. 1936), who set up his own experimental company, Odin

Teatret, in 1964. His work moved Grotowski’s Artaudianism in a new direction. He became interested in the quality of the actor’s energy, and in the actor’s ‘presence’. He invented exercises – for instance, modifications of Meyerhold’s Biomechanics – only to discover that, for him, conventional training concerned not how to act so much as how to define the self. Having worked on the margins of society in India and South America, Barba’s work explored performance vocabularies shared by performers from many dif- ferent cultures. He became interested in such fundamentals as how a performer stands, the space the performer occupies, and the actor’s energy and physiology. In this, his internationalism of perfor- mance is like that of Peter Brook. Brook’s work, too, has explored fundamental cultural exchange through performance in African villages, as well as the use of an invented language (Orghast at Persepolis) and a ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ season in London in 1964. Brook’s attempts to strip away ‘style’ are paralleled by Barba’s search for a theatre language which exists outside cultural referents.

A final example of Artaud-inspired theatre was the New York Living Theater of Julian Beck and Judith Malina. Beck was vehemently opposed to conventional actor training, preferring with his collective of performers to explore elements of physical theatre. The company’s ceremonial and ritualistic productions often involved strenuous audience participation, for which the actors trained, but, like Artaud, Beck and Malina saw their works as rites of purgation which worked for spiritual change. The Living Theater influenced other American companies in the later twentieth century, such as the Open Theater of Joseph Chaikin, the Performance Group, later the Wooster Group, and the Bread and Puppet Theater of Peter Schumann (b. 1934).