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“Dear Mr. Yeganeh,

Well done to you and to your team (Ms. Yeganeh and Mr. Ozsahin) for your precious work in the ‘Introspection’ series. In the first 4 parts, every single viewpoint of “Sadegh Hedayat” was clearly tangible. In part 1, the contrast between the conscious and unconscious and the desperate struggle of modern person to pass through the border between the two opposing worlds of ‘Outer Reality’ and ‘Inner Reality’ was skillfully and delicately framed. The Conscious (toes with polished nails and a frame of relative stability), versus the Unconscious (toes of no color for the nails, totally plain and simple, sort of floating in space seemingly lacking stability)

The overall feeling that I have experienced is the longing of one’s to cross the distance, the longing to pass through the border of logic, the longing to float and suspend freely in the infinite world of the Unconscious, the wish to fly, and the desire to free oneself off all the shackles and chains of the Conscious. A flight, a freedom though of an absurd bubble-like nature. When the light of the Conscious part is turned off, it may convey the concept of liberation, getting rid of the Conscious and staying in the well-lit part: the floating world of The Unconscious. Kind of conveying the concept of Death maybe, a concept which Sadegh Hedayat held dear all his life, or maybe conveying Hedayat’s biggest wish, experiencing liberation and infinity. The concept of smashing the border of logic and outer reality can be considered as the core of all 4 parts. Whether it is the border between the two worlds of Conscious and Unconscious, or the lines and obstacles which are made by time or place, they create a deep sense of suffocation. The suffocation can be brutally caused by time or any other seemingly logical borders, the vastness, infinity, and timelessness which was beautifully shown as the Sea and was profoundly moving.

Jazz music was really a brilliant choice. The magical improvisations, created in the best possible way a borderless, complicated space of ever-changing colors and touches the body and soul of audiences by spelling them with a variety of contrasting senses such as escape, confusion, insanity, struggle, desperation, absurdity, heaviness, fear, longing, and liberation. These can be seen in Hedayat’s writings as well.

In parts 2 and 4, masks and mask-cherishing nature of Man are displayed. The confusion and chaotic feelings are shown by the picture hanging on the wall and transferred by the power of jazz and the use of red lipstick. Maybe it would be better if more cosmetics were used or even using different masks of different shapes and colors would be more touching as I think the core idea “the masks” was kind of blurred and needs to be “colored” somehow, though it is my personal view as an audience.

In some parts, the actress’s voice could not be heard easily as the music was a bit loud and her voice a bit low. After all, I should say that this is a very insightful series and is highly recommended to be experienced.”

by Atousa Azadmehr

Learn more about Introspection Series

Watch the videos on YouTube

Mr. Jared Wright has been a collaborator at Boston Experimental Theatre since 2011, as an actor, co-producer, art director, writer and director.

I. M(O)ther will be the 5th performance/experiment BETC has undertaken under the “auspiciously” named project “The Dialogue of Civilizations”—a name that invokes and indicts the grand thoughts of huge swaths of humanity.  In my imagination the phrase conjures the pillars of our temples and minarets of our mosques bellowing at each other, “You are wrong!”  The image holds within it the underlying assumption of all civilizations—that they are bigger than us,  greater than us.  It feels as though the titans themselves must wrestle with each other to keep such a dialogue in play—Gilgamesh and Prometheus grappling on the fault lines of tectonic plates.

So then what is my place as a lowly player, poet, musician, writer? As any artist in such grand civilizational speech… and you, what is your place, dear reader, or audience, or fellow player, in that dialogue?

Despite my desire to divorce myself from my civilization (I feel the ground rumble at the mere mention)… I cannot.  My mind, my heart, my passion, even how I see and feel—all are so shaped by the history from which I was cooked up, pressed and pushed out, that I will forever be its product.  I am just another slow, salty drip on the stalagmite of the White Western World.  Stone metaphors seem fitting, because stone is almost the hardest thing I know, and to move stone is the most laborious thing I know.

II. You too, are the sweat of some stone, some eons-long struggle to survive, to master nature, to bear forth new generations with the prophetic hope that they will be better.  

The generations have cried, ‘They must be better than us!’  Because if they aren’t better than us, better than our wars over gods, our willingness to let others starve, or our starvation, our maniacal hoarding of resources, or our push upwards, feet pressed firmly on the faces of others, then was it worth bearing them into the world at all? 

Yet, in this time, those of the humanistic bent know the ‘state of emergency’ has not lifted.  We are not better.  Progress—of generations, of humanization, of thought and art and beauty—is not only not guaranteed, it is fitful and intermittent. And sometimes it moves in reverse as progress gives way to fear.  Our states of emergency are cyclical and constant, moving from nation to nation, embedded in each civilization, enough to assure me, at least, that no generation should be heralded as greater than the last.  Our stalactites and pillars are ours to move, and they won’t budge without wrenching from them those changes we seek with the most fervent and critical effort.

Each of us is dripping down the layers of ourselves, whether we want to or not. Only with the most fervent effort can those drips coalesce into something we could call ‘progress’.  We must work as we drip, so we may be made greater by each other.  We must push to fashion these pillars in such a way so that they are the sum of our many parts, acknowledging our hopes and shadows.  And that push must happen in the moment of connection and interaction.  

That is where our ‘dialogue’ can begin. Because civilizations seem incapable of speaking except in yells and accusations, but I…

I can fall in love with you…  And, just maybe, you can fall in love with me.

“The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action.” Walter Benjamin in Theses on the Philosophy of History

III.   In the general Dialogue of Civilizations our conversations seem as immovable as our temples, but it is in the particular where we can actually learn, exchange, and grow.  In a moment, you, who dripped from the stalactite of the Muslim World, and I who dripped from the Christian World can dance to new rhythms, meld our voices in chants, synchronize our movements with fluidity, or share the pains of lost loved ones who succumbed to these constant states of emergency.

In those moments of connection we are seized by a kind of elation that is usually reserved for our places of worship.  It is the personal revolutionary fervor that rises in our chests, our stomachs, our throats.  The playing of your oud can possess my body, and my movements or my poetry can electrify your daf.  We can hold each other with our gazes, listen, and unite our voices, our burdens, our hopes. 

We, an Iranian American and a Jewish American, an Iraqi and a South African, a Korean and a Turk, can discover by creating together, playing together, struggling to understand each other, fighting each other, mocking each other, supporting each other, that you are not who I thought you were, and we are not who we think we are. As Walt Whitman declared, “We are large. We contain multitudes.”  But to access that multitudinous self, of both shadow and light, we must create the space in which complexity can be held and shared.

Our hope is for our theatre to develop a stronger, deeper, and more resilient container for and a site more conducive to those interactions.

Yes, we are born of civilizations and grand categories, Muslim, Christian, Asian, Black, White and we carry those categorical histories with us, but we are also musicians, acrobats, dancers, story-tellers, children of mothers, mothers, or future mothers, lovers of the resonance of ‘that bell’, childish when given a ball, carriers of our family’s pride or shamed by our family’s secrets.  Despite being born of them and shaped by them, we are also much more than our civilizations.  The real Dialogue of Civilizations is in discovering that the alienations I feel from my categories are justified, because my civilization has betrayed me, represented and misrepresented me, even when I am present.

The new path is in discovering through dialogue a real connection to the person you encounter.  Once that connection is established, we may be able to improvise and discover new ways out.

“Why so hard?” the kitchen coal once said to the diamond. “After all, are we not close kin?”

Why so soft? O my brothers, thus I ask you: are you not after all my brothers?

Why so soft, so pliant and yielding? Why is there so much denial, self-denial, in your hearts? So little destiny in your eyes?

And if you do not want to be destinies and inexorable ones, how can you one day triumph with me?

And if your hardness does not wish to flash and cut through, how can you one day create with me?

For all creators are hard. And it must seem blessedness to you to impress your hand on millennia as on wax.

Blessedness to write on the will of millennia as on bronze — harder than bronze, nobler than bronze. Only the noblest is altogether hard.

This new tablet, O my brothers, I place over you: Become hard!

–Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

IV.  The encounter, the dialogue in the particular, won’t always be pleasant.  We are practitioners of the Theatre of Cruelty.  It’s founder, Antonin Artaud, explained, the “Theater of Cruelty means a theater difficult and cruel for myself first of all… not the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other’s bodies… but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us.”  Our theatre must be a reminder that, “We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads.” 

In fact, if our dialogues in the particular are all pleasant, someone is probably lying.  It can’t be all dancing and communing.  Too much blood has been spilled.  The ‘Dialogue between Civilizations’ was originally created in response to the term, “The Clash of Civilizations”, because so much war, oppression and dehumanization had divided our peoples that there seemed no way forward. It was Dariush Shayegan’s way of empowering Persian thought and engaging European, Western, and Asian ideas in it—creating a new path where one previously seemed impossible.  

In our devised production “The Last Dream”, we filled the stage with the beauty and strength of children from Salvadoran refugee families. Throughout the show they danced and supported each other despite U.S., anti-immigrant policies that threatened—and still threaten—to destroy their families. The stage was filled with the complex colors and celebrations of those brought up in two different worlds, but eventually a giant grey-faced creature consumed the stage and the children on it until only one was left.  A nine-year-old girl in her pink birthday dress held out her hands to the audience, looked them in the eyes and asked, “Will you help me?” Then, the lights went out.  

Our encounter should not and cannot only consist of dancing and song.  Our civilizations at large do have real ‘scores to settle’, and many of those scores are carried by us in the particular.  My fathers or my grandfathers killed yours, and maybe yours killed mine.  The effects of those deaths are felt, bodily, emotionally, and tangibly today.  In the theatre we can explore that kind of pain, those kinds of shadows, but in a container of metaphor and fantasies that will restrain the violence, honor the pain, and perhaps help us move.  You can see my shame, my rage, my desire for power, and I can see your vengeance, your envy, your lust.  You can press against me until I give and learn—and find new limits, a new call to action.

So this then is our place; players, poets, musicians, artists… push, with me and against me.  Test my every contour, and I will try to test yours.  We will prove ourselves pliable, adaptable, and adept.  And readers or audience, demand of us honesty.  Accept nothing less of us or of yourselves, and where possible, you should engage and play and confront as well.  That is our dialogue, where civilizations manifest among us.  

And if we can hold all that and still dance, still sing, and still fall in love, then perhaps we, newly pressed and transformed by each other, refined as diamonds, can move these civilizational stones.

Jared Wright

I. M(O)ther will be the 5th performance/experiment BETC has undertaken under the “auspiciously” named project “The Dialogue of Civilizations”—a name that invokes and indicts the grand thoughts of huge swaths of humanity.  In my imagination the phrase conjures the pillars of our temples and minarets of our mosques bellowing at each other, “You are wrong!”  The image holds within it the underlying assumption of all civilizations—that they are bigger than us,  greater than us.  It feels as though the titans themselves must wrestle with each other to keep such a dialogue in play—Gilgamesh and Prometheus grappling on the fault lines of tectonic plates.

So then what is my place as a lowly player, poet, musician, writer? As any artist in such grand civilizational speech… and you, what is your place, dear reader, or audience, or fellow player, in that dialogue?

Despite my desire to divorce myself from my civilization (I feel the ground rumble at the mere mention)… I cannot.  My mind, my heart, my passion, even how I see and feel—all are so shaped by the history from which I was cooked up, pressed and pushed out, that I will forever be its product.  I am just another slow, salty drip on the stalagmite of the White Western World.  Stone metaphors seem fitting, because stone is almost the hardest thing I know, and to move stone is the most laborious thing I know.

II. You too, are the sweat of some stone, some eons-long struggle to survive, to master nature, to bear forth new generations with the prophetic hope that they will be better.  

The generations have cried, ‘They must be better than us!’  Because if they aren’t better than us, better than our wars over gods, our willingness to let others starve, or our starvation, our maniacal hoarding of resources, or our push upwards, feet pressed firmly on the faces of others, then was it worth bearing them into the world at all? 

Yet, in this time, those of the humanistic bent know the ‘state of emergency’ has not lifted.  We are not better.  Progress—of generations, of humanization, of thought and art and beauty—is not only not guaranteed, it is fitful and intermittent. And sometimes it moves in reverse as progress gives way to fear.  Our states of emergency are cyclical and constant, moving from nation to nation, embedded in each civilization, enough to assure me, at least, that no generation should be heralded as greater than the last.  Our stalactites and pillars are ours to move, and they won’t budge without wrenching from them those changes we seek with the most fervent and critical effort.

Each of us is dripping down the layers of ourselves, whether we want to or not. Only with the most fervent effort can those drips coalesce into something we could call ‘progress’.  We must work as we drip, so we may be made greater by each other.  We must push to fashion these pillars in such a way so that they are the sum of our many parts, acknowledging our hopes and shadows.  And that push must happen in the moment of connection and interaction.  

That is where our ‘dialogue’ can begin. Because civilizations seem incapable of speaking except in yells and accusations, but I…

I can fall in love with you…  And, just maybe, you can fall in love with me.

“The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action.” Walter Benjamin in Theses on the Philosophy of History

III.   In the general Dialogue of Civilizations our conversations seem as immovable as our temples, but it is in the particular where we can actually learn, exchange, and grow.  In a moment, you, who dripped from the stalactite of the Muslim World, and I who dripped from the Christian World can dance to new rhythms, meld our voices in chants, synchronize our movements with fluidity, or share the pains of lost loved ones who succumbed to these constant states of emergency.

In those moments of connection we are seized by a kind of elation that is usually reserved for our places of worship.  It is the personal revolutionary fervor that rises in our chests, our stomachs, our throats.  The playing of your oud can possess my body, and my movements or my poetry can electrify your daf.  We can hold each other with our gazes, listen, and unite our voices, our burdens, our hopes. 

We, an Iranian American and a Jewish American, an Iraqi and a South African, a Korean and a Turk, can discover by creating together, playing together, struggling to understand each other, fighting each other, mocking each other, supporting each other, that you are not who I thought you were, and we are not who we think we are. As Walt Whitman declared, “We are large. We contain multitudes.”  But to access that multitudinous self, of both shadow and light, we must create the space in which complexity can be held and shared.

Our hope is for our theatre to develop a stronger, deeper, and more resilient container for and a site more conducive to those interactions.

Yes, we are born of civilizations and grand categories, Muslim, Christian, Asian, Black, White and we carry those categorical histories with us, but we are also musicians, acrobats, dancers, story-tellers, children of mothers, mothers, or future mothers, lovers of the resonance of ‘that bell’, childish when given a ball, carriers of our family’s pride or shamed by our family’s secrets.  Despite being born of them and shaped by them, we are also much more than our civilizations.  The real Dialogue of Civilizations is in discovering that the alienations I feel from my categories are justified, because my civilization has betrayed me, represented and misrepresented me, even when I am present.

The new path is in discovering through dialogue a real connection to the person you encounter.  Once that connection is established, we may be able to improvise and discover new ways out.

“Why so hard?” the kitchen coal once said to the diamond. “After all, are we not close kin?”

Why so soft? O my brothers, thus I ask you: are you not after all my brothers?

Why so soft, so pliant and yielding? Why is there so much denial, self-denial, in your hearts? So little destiny in your eyes?

And if you do not want to be destinies and inexorable ones, how can you one day triumph with me?

And if your hardness does not wish to flash and cut through, how can you one day create with me?

For all creators are hard. And it must seem blessedness to you to impress your hand on millennia as on wax.

Blessedness to write on the will of millennia as on bronze — harder than bronze, nobler than bronze. Only the noblest is altogether hard.

This new tablet, O my brothers, I place over you: Become hard!

–Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

IV.  The encounter, the dialogue in the particular, won’t always be pleasant.  We are practitioners of the Theatre of Cruelty.  It’s founder, Antonin Artaud, explained, the “Theater of Cruelty means a theater difficult and cruel for myself first of all… not the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other’s bodies… but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us.”  Our theatre must be a reminder that, “We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads.” 

In fact, if our dialogues in the particular are all pleasant, someone is probably lying.  It can’t be all dancing and communing.  Too much blood has been spilled.  The ‘Dialogue between Civilizations’ was originally created in response to the term, “The Clash of Civilizations”, because so much war, oppression and dehumanization had divided our peoples that there seemed no way forward. It was Dariush Shayegan’s way of empowering Persian thought and engaging European, Western, and Asian ideas in it—creating a new path where one previously seemed impossible.  

In our devised production “The Last Dream”, we filled the stage with the beauty and strength of children from Salvadoran refugee families. Throughout the show they danced and supported each other despite U.S., anti-immigrant policies that threatened—and still threaten—to destroy their families. The stage was filled with the complex colors and celebrations of those brought up in two different worlds, but eventually a giant grey-faced creature consumed the stage and the children on it until only one was left.  A nine-year-old girl in her pink birthday dress held out her hands to the audience, looked them in the eyes and asked, “Will you help me?” Then, the lights went out.  

Our encounter should not and cannot only consist of dancing and song.  Our civilizations at large do have real ‘scores to settle’, and many of those scores are carried by us in the particular.  My fathers or my grandfathers killed yours, and maybe yours killed mine.  The effects of those deaths are felt, bodily, emotionally, and tangibly today.  In the theatre we can explore that kind of pain, those kinds of shadows, but in a container of metaphor and fantasies that will restrain the violence, honor the pain, and perhaps help us move.  You can see my shame, my rage, my desire for power, and I can see your vengeance, your envy, your lust.  You can press against me until I give and learn—and find new limits, a new call to action.

So this then is our place; players, poets, musicians, artists… push, with me and against me.  Test my every contour, and I will try to test yours.  We will prove ourselves pliable, adaptable, and adept.  And readers or audience, demand of us honesty.  Accept nothing less of us or of yourselves, and where possible, you should engage and play and confront as well.  That is our dialogue, where civilizations manifest among us.  

And if we can hold all that and still dance, still sing, and still fall in love, then perhaps we, newly pressed and transformed by each other, refined as diamonds, can move these civilizational stones.

Jared Wright

Artaud’s Aristotelian Overture

By

Jared Wright

“Tragedy,… produces its effect even without movement; its quality is apparent from a mere reading… It offers verisimilitude when read no less than when performed.” (Aristotle 54-55)

“As if Literature were worth bothering with, as if it were not elsewhere that we had always fixed our lives.” (Artaud 161)

“It is essential to put an end to the subjugation of the theater to the text.” (Artaud 78)

“The events, the story, are the point of tragedy, and that is the most important thing of all… So the story is the foundation and as it were the soul of tragedy.” (Aristotle 24)

The Theater of Cruelty, a theater enigmatically described by Artaud as the “authentic performance of magic,” (Sontag 161) and considered one of veritable ‘impossibilities’ onstage (Lublin 62), diverged greatly from Aristotle’s Poetics and the common understanding of theatrical performance that had held fast for centuries. Aristotle’s exploration of theater and his explanations of tragedy had served as a principal authority for performance techniques and stagecraft since its inception, and while many before Artaud had questioned those tenets, the ‘Occidental’ theater seemed never to waver too far from this canon (Berghaus 26). Though Artaud’s revolutionary and elusive theater was communicated in aphoristic and often contradictory statements, it may have been fitting for it to have been difficult to grasp, because Artaud heralded his new ‘Oriental’ approach as one that revalued the center of the theatrical experience. He sought to change the theater from one of contrived literary and psychologic mimesis to an organic theater in which directors would “aim to transform the very state of …

listeners by moving them physically.” It was a lofty and, deemed by many, impossible aim, a judgement supported by most accounts which viewed his attempts at bringing a tangible Theater of Cruelty to life as failures and misunderstandings (Costich 103). This essay attempts to develop an understanding of The Theater of Cruelty by explaining the connection it maintains with the very theater it often refutes—Aristotle’s. The physical movement of the audience, a visceral response, is the goal of The Theater of Cruelty, and I contend that Artaud’s theatrical aspirations are in fact grounded in the Aristotelian concept of a cathartic theater.

The Rebel’s Conformity

It may seem counter-intuitive to consider Artaud’s use of Aristotelian concepts in light of his open antipathy to the theater predicated upon its tenets. Artaud’s distrust of Aristotle was well recorded in his writing. In “Metaphysics and the Mise en Scene,” he attacked the very core of Aristotelian theater—the text. He wrote:

How does it happen in the theater, at least in the theater as we know it in Europe, or better in the Occident, everything specifically theatrical, i.e., everything that cannot be expressed in speech, in words, or if you prefer everything that is not contained in dialogue… is left in the background?… A theater which subordinates the mise en scene and production, i.e., everything in itself that is specifically theatrical, to the text, is a theater of idiots, madmen, introverts, grammarians, grocers, antipoets and positivists, i.e., Occidentals. (39-41)

This excerpt highlights that Artaud, before resorting to insults, completely rejected the traditional understanding of stagecraft that Aristotle originated. His new focal point became the director. He seems to have responded directly to Aristotle’s assertion in Poetics that there should be a “primacy of plot” in a performance, that “staging… is not a matter of art and is not integral to poetry,” that it “belongs more to the scene painter’s… than to… the poets” (25-26). Here we must acknowledge that Artaud’s mode of transferring or communicating the story of the stage to the audience cannot be reconciled to the Aristotelian concepts of theater. Aristotle’s was a theater of the playwright, while Artaud made a demiurge of the director. The new language of gestures in space and spectacle that Artaud demanded of his theater, the theater he described as the ”poetry of the senses” (37), clearly set a demarcation line between The Cruel and the Aristotelian Theaters. But we must recognize that these were differences only in the mode of communication.

Despite only differing in mode, the extremity of Artaud’s deviations led some to contend that his work was aimless, that his was “an insurrection without an institutional foundation and thus without a predictable trajectory” (Gorelick 263). This belief derives from the seemingly endless obfuscations and extreme metaphors Artaud consistently made of his ultimate goal– a theater that can manifest a transformative experience in its audiences. Artaud felt that the older, text based, mode of theatrical expression no longer provided for the needs of audiences, but his rejection wasn’t necessarily of the ancient theater. In “Metaphysics and the Mise en Scene” when Artaud stated that he sought something, “capable of reintroducing on the stage a little breath of that great metaphysical fear which is at the root of all ancient theater”(44), he seemed to echo the sentiments of Aristotelian theater. Indeed, Aristotle demanded just that intensity from every performance. He felt that audiences must experience “a series of events [during which they] should feel dread and pity” (Aristotle 33). Artaud felt that the theater of his age had lost that ability. He confirmed this strong connection to Aristotle’s requirement of a performance in “The Theater and Cruelty” when he wrote “at the point of deterioration which our sensibility has reached, it is certain that we need above all a theater that wakes us up; nerves and heart“ (Artaud 84). The nerves, of course, are referring to fear and the heart to pity. So while Artaud sought a different means of expression, the goals of The Theater of Cruelty were the same– catharsis through fear and pity. This Aristotelian (ancient) foundation upon which he based his performance is, I believe, a starting point for understanding his eventual, while not necessarily predictable, trajectory.

Historical Release

The goal, the telos, of theater, as set out in Aristotle’s Poetics, is catharsis. Aristotle emphasizes this point in his summarizing section, “What has been said” at the beginning of Poetics. As Belfiore states, “The definition of tragedy, the conclusion… include[s] the final cause (telos) of tragedy, and Aristotle’s phrasing, ‘Accomplishing katharsis,” suggests that Katharsis is this final cause’”(158). In his definition of tragedy, which he considered the only worthy form of performance, Aristotle stated that tragedy would “Effect through pity and fear, the purification of such emotions” (23). Acknowledging that catharsis is the goal of theater demands that we interrogate the term, which has been contested and debated by scholars since Poetics was rediscovered in the Renaissance. For a proper evaluation of the ways in which The Theater of Cruelty as laid out by Artaud shares this desired effect, we must come to an understanding of what Aristotle actually meant by a cathartic theater. Scholars and philologists have offered varying interpretations with their own sets of implications for the stage, and Aristotle’s full explanation of the term has infamously been lost to antiquity. A cursory review of the essential interpretations will help us place Artaud in the framework of that canon. (Meisiek 800).

The etymology of catharsis has its origins in the practices of medicine and rituals in ancient Greece. The Dionysian cult used cathartic rituals to cleanse the body of sicknesses through ecstatic expressions and dances. Most translators decide to interpret catharsis as a “purification,” but some apply the terms “cleansing,” “purgation,” or “refining” (Kenny XXV). These translations reflect the various historical interpretations of the actual cathartic state. During the Renaissance it was interpreted as a cleansing of the mind from erroneous thoughts or beliefs or a negative affect (Meisiek 801). Christian thinkers such as Rousseau interpreted it as a movement toward stoicism, an attempt at hardening the audience to the suffering evident in life, a purgation of fear and pity. Lessing conceived of a refining catharsis, a transforming of passions into virtues through empathy, a balancing or calibration, par excellence. Goethe and Nietzsche approached catharsis as an aesthetic element of drama, a feeling of completion in the performance itself, slowly relieving it of its didactic responsibility (Pavis 45).

A Comparative Analysis

The Theater of Cruelty seems to flout all of these interpretations of catharsis. In The Theater and Its Double, Artaud indirectly addresses the Renaissance’s understanding of catharsis as a cognitive movement from ignorance to enlightenment. He asserts in “The Alchemical Theater” that: to analyze such… drama philosophically is impossible; only poetically and by seizing upon what is communicative and magnetic in the principles of all the arts can we, by shapes, sounds, music, and volumes, evoke, passing by way of all natural resemblances of images and affinities to each other not the primordial directions of the mind, which our excessive logical intellectualism would reduce to merely useless schemata, but states of an acuteness so intense and absolute that we sense, beyond the tremors of all music and form, the underlying menace of a chaos as decisive as it is dangerous. (50)

This quotation elucidates the aim of The Theater of Cruelty as one that creates a feeling, not an intellectual understanding or a cleansing of erroneous thoughts. Artaud believed that the theater should occupy a field of expression inaccessible to articulation. In Artaud’s panegyric ”On the Balinese Theater” he lauds the actors as performers of “animated hieroglyphs” emphasizing that “these spiritual signs have a precise meaning which strikes us only intuitively but with enough violence to make useless any translation into logical discursive language” (54). Here he emphasized the theater’s responsibility to give expression to “the unknown, fabulous, and obscure reality which we here in the Occident have completely repressed” (61). The intention of such a theater would not ground its end in a catharsis of the same mind it subjugates.

Artaud also decisively rejected the Christian interpretations of catharsis as a cleansing of negative affect or as a morally instructive medium. In “The Theater and the Plague,” Artaud demanded we create a theater that can, “motivate acts so gratuitously absurd” so as to liken it to a plague. He feels at the moment when disease can cripple a society and all norms collapse, “at that moment the theater is born. The Theater, i.e., an immediate gratuitousness provoking acts without use or profit” (Artaud, 24). Here, Artaud exhibits a chaotic understanding of the cathartic moment, when anything can happen, any impulse can be acted upon. Artaud revels in Augustine’s revulsion of the ‘sinful spectacles’ of theater, writing, “Augustine complains of this similarity between the action of the plague that kills without destroying the organs, and the theater which, without killing, provokes the most mysterious alterations in the mind of not only the individual but an entire populace” (26). Augustine identifies the theater as a “dangerous scourge… that attacks not bodies but customs… the soul” (26). He understands the theater as a corruptor of goodness, the opposite of a creator of purity or stoicism, and Artaud relishes in the corruptive power of the theater. He writes, “In the theater as in the plague there is something both victorious and vengeful” (27). Here, it is clear; Artaud places little value on a moralizing theater.

As with the other interpretations of catharsis, The Theater of Cruelty repudiates performances that refine or balance desires or produce an aesthetic satisfaction. Artaud sought “a theater that also takes gestures and pushes them as far as they will go”(27) and he contends that from theater, “we desire an example of absolute freedom in revolt,” when “we are obliged to advance still further into an endless vertigo”(29). A theater that encourages such extremes would be deemed incompatible with the concepts of par excellence. Artaud scoffed at any performance that catered to such ends. He decried “the spiritual infirmity of the Occident, which is the place par excellence where men have confused art and aestheticism… in an attempt to castrate the forms of art” (70). His contempt for theater that focused on art for art’s sake was keenest in his thoughts on “The Alfred Jarry Theater.” Artaud wrote, “If the theater is an amusement, too many serious problems demand our attention for us to be able to divert the least particle of it to anything so ephemeral” (Sontag 155). He continued, “If we did not have the very clear and very profound sense that an intimate part of our lives was involved in that spectacle, we would see no point in pursuing the experiment” (156). To Artaud, the source of performance had to be in the real world, an essential element of our lives.

What is Left

Where, then, does that leave us? The historical interpretations of catharsis fail to address the aims of The Theater of Cruelty. The Cruel Theater, as defined by Artaud, was one that evoked “untranslatable” (Artaud 71) feelings involving an “intimate part of our lives” (Sontag 156) whose “object is not to resolve social or psychological conflict…, but to express objectively certain secret truths, to bring to the light of day certain aspects of truth that have been buried” (Artaud 70). He desired that audience members know as they entered the theater, that they “would not come out unscathed.” Artaud wanted an intensely serious theater that would express feelings otherwise inexpressible. But that goal, and the failure of that goal to assimilate to historical interpretations of catharsis, does not leave the Cruel Theater outside the realm of cathartic theater. The fault may lie with the interpretations of Aristotelian catharsis and not the original intent.

Some modern scholars find earlier readings of Poetics to be insufficient. Elizabeth Belfiore asserts in Tragic Pleasures: Aristotle on Plot and Emotion that “Many scholars… have erred in interpreting catharsis too narrowly, in terms of only one of these aspects” (259). She highlights that, “G.E. Lessing characterized catharsis in exclusively ethical terms,” and that “earlier works overemphasized the intellectual aspects of katharsis, arguing that katharsis is ‘the process of clarification’” (259). When she says that these thinkers “failed to take into account Aristotle’s view that the emotions had cognitive as well as physical aspects,” she contends that Aristotle had a more encompassing definition of the cathartic movement, one that “was suitable to the whole nature of man” (259-60).

Other contemporary thinkers have viewed their predecessors’ interpretations of catharsis as inadequate. Boal rebelled against the common concept of catharsis as nothing more than, “Aristotle’s coercive system of tragedy… a very powerful purgative system, the object of which is to eliminate all that is not commonly accepted” (47). He desired a catharsis that motivates action, which echoes in similar tones Artaud’s ideas proposed in “The Theater and the Plague.”

Artaud asserts that, “In the true theater a play disturbs the sense’s repose, frees the repressed unconscious, incites a kind of virtual revolt” (28). The Cruel Theater’s aim was to reveal something that was so powerful that it could cause “true action” or impulsive expression that would before have seemed unconscionable. But then where does that cruel catharsis fit into Aristotle’s original explanation?

One possible overlap appears in Samuel Weber’s “Theatricality as Medium,” which identifies commonalities between Artaudian and Aristotelian catharsis. In his chapter “The Virtual Reality of Theater: Antonin Artaud” he writes:

Does not Artaud’s defense of the Theater of Cruelty recall Aristotle’s defense of tragedy in terms of catharsis, a kind of purgation? Is there not throughout Artaud’s writings on theater an appeal to ‘‘action’’ that ‘‘doubles,’’ as it were, Aristotle’s emphasis on tragic mimesis as the imitation of an action, a praxeos? (Weber 279)

Weber understands that Artaud wasn’t necessarily “anti-Aristotelian,” but merely against the manipulations of Aristotle’s Poetics that were prevalent in the theater of his time. Weber also charged both theoreticians with forming ideas of catharsis that are didactic: “And does not Artaud’s emphasis… on a certain pedagogical function of theater also echo the passages in the Poetics in which Aristotle seeks to justify mimesis against its Platonic condemnation by stressing its didactic virtues?”(279) Artaud vehemently confirms this as he writes in the Alfred Jarry Theater, “Henceforth [we] will go to the theater the way [we] go[es] to the surgeon or the dentist.” (Sontag 160). Weber recognizes that there is something to be learned, intuitively, in the cathartic moments of both Artaud and Aristotle.

Of course the lessons of Aristotle and Artaud differ greatly, but that would not eliminate Artaud from applying his more chaotic message to a similar cathartic function in the theater. Interestingly, Weber does not agree. He contends that Aristotle’s ideological differences from Artaud create a rift for the Cruel Theater that make it irreconcilable to the Aristotelian cathartic moment. He says that Aristotle was always moving toward unity, consensus, that his theater “is ultimately concerned, not with individuals, but with making ‘‘man’’ and his consciousness the measure of all things, in particular, the measure of all theater” (282). To Weber, Artaud, by contrast, wanted all audiences to be reminded of the fact that “the sky can still fall on our heads,” that our unity forming systems are constructs (283-285). Weber’s primary assertion and eventual conclusion is that the “rigor” and “cruelty” to which Artaud constantly refers– an unrelenting ‘virtual reality’ that must be transferred to the stage (282), sets him apart from Aristotle. Weber errs when, in the course of his “virtual” realization, he precludes a commonality between Artaudian and Aristotelian catharsis. He asserts that Artaud “seeks to dehumanize the notion of peripeteia (the fear driving the cathartic moment) and thereby to turn it against its mythological origins” (Aristotle) (286). For Weber, Artaud’s deviant didactic message separates his catharsis from Aristotle’s, but this summation fails to consider the contexts into which each theater needs to speak.

A Continued Connection

Weber’s engagement with The Cruel Theater, one that holds true to Artaud’s ideological message, seems to fall prey in its course to the same error of earlier epochs by limiting the definition of Aristotelian catharsis. That Aristotle could not have imagined a catharsis that could properly deliver its purgative affect without touting his dogmas greatly underestimates his foresight. Scholars recognize that Aristotle was a philosopher foremost, and he sought to arrange

a complete ontology; he may even have preferred tragedy to affirm his beliefs, but his explication of dramatic art did not limit tragedy so. He even states at the beginning of the history of tragedy that “this (Poetics) is not the place to inquire whether even now tragedy is all that it should be… whether in itself or in relation to its audience” (21). To Aristotle tragedy was representation of truth, and catharsis was the physical and emotional revelation of that same truth created through the performance of the tragedy. So the relation of those truths could always be improved upon. He acknowledges himself that he did not know if the means to create that catharsis reached its full potential, whether tragedy “is all that it should be…” This acknowledgement almost begs for innovation in the mode of transferring the cathartic goal.

While he did anticipate changes upon the form, Aristotle assuredly did not anticipate a breach of form quite as stark as The Cruel Theater, but Artaud’s extreme deviation was actually an attempt at a return to the cathartic theater of Aristotle’s drama. He writes in “The Theater and the Plague”:

The terrorizing apparition of Evil which in the Mysteries of Eleusis was produced in its pure, truly revealed form corresponds to the dark hour of certain ancient tragedies which all true theater must recover. If the essential theater is like the plague, it is not because it is contagious, but because like the plague it is the revelation, the bringing forth, the exteriorization of latent cruelty.

This excerpt speaks to two important points. The theater, to Artaud, had lost its potency, and that potency was lost because that theater could no longer transfer fear and pity effectively to reveal truth or exteriorize, physicalize, its relieving aspect. Here is Artaud’s catharsis, one that strikes the audience as a physical revelation of true conditions and relieves the viewer of dependency upon false constraints. It may be termed as a purgation, but it is one that purges in a very physical way, the effects of a repressed self.

Artaud’s physical cathartic effect harkens to Breuer’s and Freud’s experiments with the psychological and physical manifestations of repressed expression in Studies on Hysteria. In their experimentation with Anna O., a woman with severe physical manifestations of what they called a “strangulated affect” (Breuer and Freud 286), Breuer and Freud found catharsis to be the desirous result of her free expression of her experience. Eventually Freud took the term catharsis from Breuer, called it abreaction, and incorporated it into his psychoanalyses. These pre-psychoanalytical experiments consciously appealed to the cathartic method of Dionysian festivals (Meisiek 6).

Belfiore finds insight into Aristotle’s understanding of catharsis from a return to Dionysian festivals as well. Within the ecstatic displays and purgative elements of the spectacle at the Dionysian festival, she says that Aristotle’s “tragedy is a verbal analogue of the drinking cup reproduced in the frontispiece, in which a terrifying gorgoneion glares in the midst of reveling wine drinkers” (359). In such a description the gorgoneion, a monster who purges revelers of their supposed confidence in systems as they are, seems to be reminiscent of Artaud’s intentions for the Theater of the Plague. Indeed, Belfiore continues, “Aristotle fully agreed with Aeschylus: There is a place where the terrible is good, and must remain established, an overseer of thoughts” (359). Such an assertion of the menace in tragedy exhibits an understanding of tragedy and the cathartic moment that reminds one that “the sky can still fall on our heads.”

That ancient grounding in a physical purgation of suffocating affect, the cathartic method of Dionysian rituals, is where Artaud sought to return. He wanted to reintroduce the gorgoneion into the room. But to create true representation one must create a theater that reproduces the essential struggles of the age in which it is performed. Only then can one have a catharsis that “seems to manifest its presence in… the very organs of the body” (Artaud 21). Aristotle’s philosophy responded to the zeitgeist of his era—one that built the foundations of Western thought. Therefore the catharsis of his theater would give to his audiences a physical and emotional revelation reflecting that philosophy, a sense of consensus. Artaud belonged to a post Nietzsche, post Kierkegaard world, a world that was questioning the primacy of man’s meaning-making ontologies, so it would only make sense to reveal a truth that reflected his time. His deviations from the other tenets of Aristotelian theater were actually an attempt at reinstating his understanding of the ‘ancient’ catharsis to which Aristotle alludes. The means of delivering what Aristotle deemed the telos of all tragedy no longer struck audiences with enough force. So in Artaud’s fidelity to the principle doctrine of Aristotelian theater, he dismembered it to “restore the theater, by means of ceremonies of indubitable age… to its original destiny” (53). That aim, an effective mimesis that can physically reveal truth and purge an audience of misconceptions of an easy world, does not separate The Theater of Cruelty from Aristotle’s theater, but is the critical element that unites them.

Works Cited:

Aristotle. Kenny, Anthony, Translator. Poetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and Its Double. New York: Grove Press, 1958.

Belfiore, Elizabeth. Tragic Pleasures: Aristotle on Plot and Emotion. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Boal, Augusto. McBride, Charles and Maria, Translators. Theatre of the Oppressed. New York: Theatre Communications Group. 1979.

Breuer, Josef, and Sigmund Freud. Studies on Hysteria. New York: Basic, 1957. Print.

Costich, Julia. Antonin Artaud. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978.

Gorelick, Nathan. “Life in Excess: Insurrection and Expenditure in Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty”. Discourse 33.2 (2011): 263–279. Web.

Lublin, Robert. “Cadences of Cruelty: Artaud’s Discursive Performance”. Theatre Symposium Vol. 8 (2000). Web: http://works.bepress.com/robert_lublin/3/.

Meisiek, Stefan. “Which Catharsis Do They Mean? Aristotle, Moreno, Boal and Organization Theatre.” Organization Studies (2004): 797-816. Print.

Moser, Keith. “(Re)-Attaching Truth to the Physical Realities of the Universe : Antonin Artaud and J.M.G. Le Clezio’s Philosophical Quest.” Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics. 34 p.83. Print.

Pavis, Patrice. Shantz, Christine, Translator. Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts, and Analysis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 1998.

Sakellaridou, Elizabeth. “Oh my god, audience participation!: Some twenty-first-century reflections”. Comparative Drama. 48.1-2 p.13. Print.

Sontag, Susan, ed. Artaud, Antonin. Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings. California: University of California, 1976.

Mr. Ben Howe is the founder and brew master of Enlightenment Ales, and co-founder and the brew master of OtherLands Beer. His beers and philosophy have been strongly inspirational on Boston Experimental Theatre. In 2013, he donated DAY TRIP ALE to our production CREATURES, which was the first co-production between Iran and the U.S. 

BEER and Dialogue Among Civilizations  

Perhaps six months or so before Vahdat Yeganeh proposed his Dialogue Among Civilizations he and I had spent an evening together listening to music, waxing philosophical, and sharing Belgian beer. Among the beers we enjoyed that evening was a tiny bottle from Brussels called “Taras Boulba.” What followed that evening were several months of research (read drinking a LOT of Taras Boulba), emailing other brewers, and working on recipes all with the hopes of creating a beer anything like the one we enjoyed. I realized that I had never had another beer, Belgian or American, that tasted anything like it. It had this intensely dry bitterness and spicy floral hop nose all wrapped up in a cute 4.5% Belgian golden ale package. After a considerable amount of time test-batching, reformulating, and test-batching some more I released “Day Trip: Extra Hoppy Golden Ale” with my brewery Enlightenment Ales.

How does any of this relate to cultural exchange? Here’s some background: The American craft brewing movement began in the U.S. very much like a renaissance. Home-brewers and early commercial craft brewers were rediscovering styles of beer and beer flavors of which their ancestors had known but with which they were unfamiliar. Pale Ales, Porters, Stouts, IPAs, Barley Wines, all styles still brewed on the other side of the Atlantic, were suddenly being sought after here in the U.S. The same was true of the artisanal ales of Belgium and the flavorful lagers of Germany. Within a decade or two American craft brewers were not only brewing European styles of beer as well as their foreign counterparts were, they were pushing the styles in completely unheard of directions. Barrel aged beer, sour beer, and beer with novel ingredients or techniques flourished in the American craft beer scene. Amazingly enough, because American brewers had no defined cultural attachments or requirements, they were free to experiment and innovate in ways their European counterparts were not.

While American craft brewing had in its infancy drawn inspiration and influence from the beers of England, Belgium, and Germany, some brewers in those countries now began to draw upon the ideas of Americans in their own work. While European brewing still remains quite traditional there are many continental brewers engaging in the same experimentation and breaking of boundaries that is the norm here in the U.S.

What intrigued me about my own Taras Boulba experience was that I came to see myself as engaging in yet another wave of cultural exchange. American brewers drew on Belgian brewing for inspiration. Then, once we began understanding their beers and radically altering them to satisfy our own creative impulses we became the source of inspiration. I believed that a beer like Taras Boulba, with its gorgeous hop nose and solid bitterness must have been inspired by American ideas and tastes. I understood Taras Boulba as a Belgian brewer’s take on hoppy American ale, albeit with his own ideas about hop varieties and yeast character. I saw my attempt to capture this Belgo-American character in my own beer as a shot back at the Belgian brewers. They influenced us, we influenced them, they influenced us again and now here’s my response!

When I finally had the opportunity to speak with Yvan De Baets, the master brewer behind Taras Boulba, I discovered that the truth, as usual, is a bit more complicated. It’s always hard to track down the precise source of one’s influences, as art is never as black and white as an essay on artistic influence would like it to seem.  That said, it’s clear to me that the cultural exchange in brewing in the last few decades has been tremendously important. Whether it’s American to Belgian, English to American, or Japanese to Danish, brewers of all nationalities are sharing their ideas in ways that transcend literal language barriers. With any luck I’ll someday soon be sharing a pint with a brewer from Tehran and discovering just how much I can learn from Iran, its beer, and its people.

Ben Howe

Brewer & Founder

Enlightenment Ales

LEARN MORE ABOUT CREATURES; A THEATRE COLLABORATION BETWEEN BOSTON AND TEHRAN…

Boston Experimental Theatre’s new production “ Creation In Progress: To Have Done With The Judgment Of God” is a long term workshop to continue studying the theatre of Antonin Artaud and Jerzy Grotowski in rehearsals and the public performances. In our new project we are collaborating with the great visual artist Philippe Lejeune and his concept of glass.

These workshops are series of exercises to create an environment in the rehearsal room that encourages actors, designers and musicians to discover the relationships between their bodies, their imaginations, and their environment such as space, light, sound and more importantly others in the room. Through this process actors explore their thoughts and feelings and allow relationships to happen and the show grows organically from this intimate and intense atmosphere.

Boston Experimental Theatre is very excited to bring this workshop to the public and invite spectator’s imagination to our work to learn from these live interactions and continue forward.

watch creating The Spurt of Blood; To Have Done With The Judgment Of God

“Watch more videos from our workshops.”

A video from our very first rehearsal connecting to the glass:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=BauPPESO4iw

“This is the way the world will ends”

“Watch more videos from our workshops.”

The Misunderstanding

In The Misunderstanding, we see Camus grappling with his post-Myth of Sisyphus conception of the absurd as the real foundation of a life not reflected upon. While some characters’ actions are absurd in a comical sense, the blind acceptance of absurd actions by the more ‘real’ characters should give more pause to the reflective viewer. Which actions and characters are truly absurd? And what relations do they bear to us, those who are inevitably drawn in? In regarding this play, one is tempted to focus upon the obvious but forced to address the subtle. They are the subtle actions and interactions that become the most real and, in a truly Camusian turn, the most dire.

In the end, one must truly ask oneself questions about the value of life, the value of death, and the role that a simple human being plays in their coming to fruition. And all of this is painted upon a canvas that disarms the viewer to the true absurdity of events by drawing attention to the superficially absurd. Be cautious in approaching this play; it will suggest to a viewer that which is comical while convincing the viewer of that which is dangerous.

~ Peter August

The most absurd way in which a man can die is in a car accident
-Attributed to Camus

Absurdité, or absurdity, is a situational trait that we often like to regulate into convenient spaces within our lives. We write it into our comedies, raise it out of our children, frown upon it in our working lives; we move it hither and thither until the sobriety of straightforward expectations develops into the illusion of control. We attempt to sequester the absurd to every part of our lives that is less real – less immanent. And yet, the absurd encroaches into every crevice of our existence. Such, to Albert Camus, is the essence of absurdity.

Camus wrote The Misunderstanding in 1943 war-torn France, one year after his famous novel The Stranger and his essay The Myth of Sisyphus, in which he expresses his well-known musing that the main problem of philosophy is suicide, and whether or not life is truly worth living. In this ground-breaking essay, Camus wonders whether there can be a “rationality unto death”, or a series of simply logical propositions that lead to the conclusion that death is not merely unavoidable, but desirable. His conclusion is compelling, deciding that there is value in life, not in absolute terms, but also neither in purely arbitrary terms either. Life becomes a serious search for real meaning couched in absurdity. He sets himself apart in this work from the French existentialists, with whom others often identified him, but with whom he never saw himself.

It is truly telling that Camus wrote The Misunderstanding the year following The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus. His depiction of Meursault’s life in The Stranger was one of his strongest absurdist depictions of his literary career, and his musings on philosophy in The Myth of Sisyphus became the very philosophical ideas with which he is most often identified. The Misunderstanding itself exists at the crossroads of the brilliant ideas in those two former works. In The Misunderstanding, Camus seems to make one of his most cogent points about the relationship between death and absurdity.

Like any work of value, Camus’ writing did not exist in a vacuum. He was very much driven by an over-arching political interest that saw his participation in a potpourri of groups from World War II until his death in 1960. Depending upon where and when he was, he aligned himself variously with peace movements in his birth-land of Algeria during the Algerian War, with Communists during the ‘30s, with both pacifists and rebels in occupied France, and with human rights activists throughout the ‘50s. The political impulse was clearly present in Camus, and one must wonder to what extent the ideas of political involvement and the absurd actually coincided in his mind.

Philosopher, writer, activist, and Nobel laureate; pacifist, rebel, man of letters, and man of action; Camus was nothing simply, but rather everything complexly. His ideas are more than mere representations of the world surrounding him; they are exhortations regarding the world surrounding us. They are not artifacts from a dusty history; they are living reflections that carry on to the future. After all, Camus himself did end up dying as a passenger in the very kind of car accident that he reportedly reflected upon earlier in his life. The true embodiment of his absurdism, Camus unquestionably was.

~ Peter August

“Actors and audience, fundamentally an interpersonal situation.”

~Lorna Nogueira