Antonin Artaud
Antonin Artaud
Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, better known as Antonine Artaud, was a French dramatist, poet, essayist, actor, and theatre director, widely recognized as one of the major figures of twentieth-century theatre and the European avant-garde...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth4 September 1896
CountryFrance
sarcasm chaos
Without sarcasm I sink into chaos.
heart men hands
I am a man by virtue of my hands and my feet, my belly, my heart of meat, my stomach whose knots reunite me to the putrefaction of life.
real calm kind
A real theatrical experience shakes the calm of the senses, liberates the compressed unconscious and drives towards a kind of potential revolt . . .
writing hell built
No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.
heart athlete actors
The actor is an athlete of the heart.
fall mean exercise
Theater of Cruelty means a theater difficult and cruel for myself first of all. And, on the level of performance, it is not the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other’s bodies, carving up our personal anatomies, or, like Assyrian emperors, sending parcels of human ears, noses, or neatly detached nostrils through the mail, but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has been created to teach us that first of all.
mean soul humanity
There are souls that are incurable and lost to the rest of society. Deprive them of one means of folly, they will invent ten thousand others. They will create subtler, wilder methods, methods that are absolutely DESPERATE. Nature herself is fundamentally antisocial, it is only by a usurpation of powers that the organized body of society opposes the natural inclination of humanity.
art existence works-of-art
I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself
pain angel years
I have need of angels. Enough hell has swallowed me for too many years. But finally understand this--I have burned up one hundred thousand human lives already, from the strength of my pain.
beautiful true-beauty sun
This is why true beauty never strikes us directly. The setting sun is beautiful because of all it makes us lose.
truth dice affirmation
I see in the act of throwing the dice and of risking the affirmation of some intuitively felt truth, however uncertain, my whole reason for living.
believe men doe
We must believe in a sense of life renewed by the theater, a sense of life in which man fearlessly makes himself master of what does not yet exist, and brings it into being. And everything that has not been born can still be brought to life if we are not satisfied to remain mere recording organisms.
moving shadow use
The true theater, because it moves and makes use of living instruments, continues to stir up shadows where life has never ceased to grope its way.
Those who live, live off the dead.