The Theater and Its Double

Amazon.com Price: $12.23 (as of 09/11/2019 17:08 PST- Details)

Categories: , , , , , , ,

Description

A collection of manifestos originally published in 1938, The Theater and Its Double is the fullest observation of the ideas of Antonin Artaud. “We cannot go on prostituting the idea of the theater, the only value of which is in its excruciating, magical relation to reality and danger,” he wrote. He fought vigorously against an encroaching conventionalism he found anathema to the very concept of theater. He sought to use theater to transcend writing, “to break through the language with the intention to touch life.”

Since its first publication in 1938, The Theater and Its Double by the French artist and philosopher Antonin Artaud has continued to provoke, inspire, enrage, enliven, challenge, and goad any number of theatrical debates in its call for a “Theater of Cruelty.” A trio of theatrical manifestos, the book is an aggressive attack on a number of the most treasured beliefs of both theater and Western culture. According to Artaud, the theater’s “double” is very similar to its Jungian “shadow,” the unacknowledged, unconscious element that completes it but is in many ways its opposite. As “culture” inexorably draws the artistic impulse into protected channels, the repressed irrational urges of theater, based on dreams, religion, and emotion, are more and more necessary to “purge” the sickness of society. Artaud identifies language itself as some of the major cultural culprits, and his attacks on it every so often makes his text rough going. But his challenge to restore relevance to the heart of the theatrical experience remains fundamental to the vitality of theater, and his insistence on the sensory experience of drama versus the literary (and such innovative ideas as the usage of unconventional “found spaces”) continues to be the clarion call of the theatrical avant-garde. –John Longenbaugh

Related products

Home » Shop » Books » Specialty Boutique » New, Used and Rental Textbooks » Humanities » Performing Arts » Theater » The Theater and Its Double

Recent Products