Emotion Line

This was an experiment in portraying the varying intensity of emotions and how to increase or decrease that intensity. For this exercise a group of six actors were arranged in a line facing the audience and were each number in sequence from 1 to 6. Starting at actor No.1, they were then each given a second number from 7 to 12.

They were then given a particular emotion to respond to (love, anger, etc.,) and their number indicated the level of intensity that they must attempt to portray.  Moving along the line, the actors had to portray the same emotion with two different levels of intensity.

This exercise was to explore some of Artaud’s ideas expressed in his ‘Theatre of Cruelty.’  When Artaud talks of cruelty, he does not mean it in a violent or physically harmful way but it is the idea that showing the audience a ‘truth’ that they might not want to see is cruel and could be emotionally painful.

“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.”

– Lee Jamieson, Antonin Artaud: From Theory to Practice, Greenwich Exchange, 2007, p.23

No Language Argument

We were instructed to perform an ‘argument’ without using any recognisable words or language.  We had to convey all the complex emotions involved when arguing but with only sounds, grunts and moans.  This exercise helped us to understand how simple, physical actions and sounds can carry so much meaning without the need for dialogue.

This exercise was then developed further by allowing the performers to choose a single word to use in their argument, instead of just sounds.  Some of the words people chose for their arguments were abusive and insulting (fuck, cunt, etc.,) but I think the performers who chose basic words, and kept their conflicts simple, were more effective.  If the word is less specific, you can give the impression of a wider range of issues being discussed.

Slow Motion Tennis

We were divided into pairs and instructed to play our partners in a game of tennis.  This was to be a purely physical, non-verbal exercise and must be carried out in slow motion.  There were no racquets, no balls, no court so we had to create an imaginary space in which to play our game.  We were encouraged to keep up our concentration in the game and to become completely involved physically in maintaining the flow of the game backwards and forwards.  This exercise was continued until we had to call on our reserves of stamina to keep up the task and still appear alert and committed.  This was to illustrate the method that Artaud would have used with his actors and the extreme discipline needed to continue a task beyond the stage that you feel you can’t go on.

Initial Ideas

I found Artaud’s ‘The Nerve Meter’ to be a very confusing and dark piece of literature, on the first account of reading it I did not know much about Antonin Artaud’s life, I thought it could be Artaud having some sort of mental breakdown, and he is explaining to the reader, through powerful language devices.  What he feels and thinks during this moment.  A word that seems to be repeated is “abyss.”  From this I derived the idea that perhaps he is not having a breakdown, but a realisation of his insignificance to the universe.  I thought this idea had some substance to it so I began looking closely at some lines that I thought proved this, “This crust of words” this almost sounds like he is speaking about all the different things that humans create to make life make more sense, and in this moment Artaud is realising the true unimportance of human life.

Shortly after my first reading I researched a bit more about Artaud, and discovered that he was an opium addict.  I quickly realised that this dark piece of work could have been written on the come down of this drug, as it would have most likely made him view the world in a more negative way.  I knew that this poem would be great fun to work on, especially if we were being given the ability to break free from naturalism, and let a lot more of the stranger side of acting out.

Although I still wasn't sure quite how we would create and perform our piece. 

The poem itself

The Nerve Meter

An actor is seen as if through crystals.

Inspiration in stages.

One musn’t let in too much literature.

I have aspired no further than the clockwork of the soul, I have transcribed only the pain of an abortive adjustment.

I am a total abyss. Those who believed me capable of a whole pain, a beautiful pain, a dense and fleshy anguish, an anguish which is a mixture of objects, an effervescent grinding of forces rather than a suspended point

—and yet with restless, uprooting impulses which come from the confrontation of my forces with these abysses of offered finality

(from the confrontation of forces of powerful size),

and there is nothing left but the voluminous abysses, the immobility, the cold—

in short, those who attributed to me more life, who thought me at an earlier stage in the fall of the self, who believed me immersed in a tormented noise, in a violent darkness with which I struggled

—are lost in the shadows of man.

In sleep, nerves tensed the whole length of my legs.

Sleep came from a shifting of belief, the pressure eased, absurdity stepped on my toes.

It must be understood that all of intelligence is only a vast contingency, and that one can lose it, not like a lunatic who is dead, but like a living person who is in life and who feels working on himself its attraction and its inspiration (of intelligence, not of life).

The titillations of intelligence and this sudden reversal of contending parties.

Words halfway to intelligence.

This possibility of thinking in reverse and of suddenly reviling one’s thought.

This dialogue in thought.

The ingestion, the breaking off of everything.

And all at once this trickle of water on a volcano, the thin, slow falling of the mind.

To find oneself again in a state of extreme shock, clarified by unreality, with, in a corner of oneself, some fragments of the real world.

To think without the slightest breaking off, without pitfalls in my thought, without one of those sudden disappearances to which my marrow is accustomed as a transmitter of currents.

My marrow is sometimes amused by these games, sometimes takes pleasure in these games, takes pleasure in these furtive abductions over which the sense of my thought presides.

At times all I would need is a single word, a simple little word of no importance, to be great, to speak in the voice of the prophets: a word of witness, a precise word, a subtle word, a word well steeped in my marrow, gone out of me, which would stand at the outer limit of my being,

and which, for everyone else, would be nothing.

I am the witness, I am the only witness of myself. This crust of words, these imperceptible whispered transformations of my thought, of that small part of my thought which I claim has already been formulated, and which miscarries,

I am the only person who can measure its extent.