'Mirroring the Double and the Cruel'

living, uncaging, offending, celebrating, analysing: considerations on a few artistic experiences that echoed Artaud’s thought

Abstract

This text focuses on some authors and their artistic experiences, particularly in the sixties and seventies, on which Antonin Artaud's reverberations are evident or underlying. If the radical theatrical conceptions of The Living Theater firmly found on the theory of the “Theatre of Cruelty” for direct testimony of its own most prominent exponents, John Cage does not deny to have drawn inspiration from the Theater and Its Double in its revolutionary conception of performance. More challenging, perhaps an anomaly, it is to find Artaud's influence alongside theatrical and performance experiences based on the literary text and on the spoken word, such as those of Peter Handke's Offending the Audience and of Klaus Kinski's Jesus Christ the Savior, where the relationship performer/spectator is tensioned in order to dissolve the fourth wall. Artaud was a source of inspiration also for the development of a type of performance which implies on the requalification and implementation of the collective ritual, the role of the performer, the body expressing primordial impulses to celebrate life and the creation like The Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries conceived by Hermann Nitsch. Eventually, disciplines such as Theatre and Performance Studies are, precisely, debtors to Artaud when tackling the notions of performance, performativity and performative.