After my first initial reading of the play, not only was I confused by Artaud's writing, but also the general story of the play itself. It opens with two characters professing their love for each other, repeating the phrase "I love you and everything is beautiful" - at first this just looked like the simple exchange between two lovers, however, it personally developed for me into Artaud displaying how desperate and simplistic the human world can be, they weren't truly displaying love - they were just desperate for a response from one another. However, this was my own personal interpretation of this segment as that's the beauty of Artaud's work, it can be interpreted in hundreds of different ways.
His use of stage directions leave no information for the director or actors to follow, purely the visual image he imagined. Though this poses a challenge for both the director and the actors, it also allows the director to have complete creative freedom with their interpretation. In our own interpretations of a segment of the text, I found it really interesting how every group chose to include physical movements to tell the story combined with vocals, rather than relying purely on the text and trying to literally convey what Artaud had written down. For example, each group decided to use stomping and physical movement combined with noise making to portray the moments of the hurricane and thunder. Not only is this an experimental way of presenting the stage directions, but they were also all completely uniquely carried out. By doing this exercise and developing a piece, it really helped me develop skills in regards to developing a piece from a piece of text that has very few straight forward stage directions - it really allowed us as a group to create it uniquely but still giving the original text justice. If we had been given the task of staging the whole text, I feel the entire class would've carried it out extremely interestingly, all drawing completely different conclusions about what Artaud is trying to present to the audience.
My personal interpretation is that Artaud is trying to display the extreme basics and showing the human race and it's most basic and truthful form. I feel this is highlighted largely with the character of the 'Bawd', who is possibly the most vulnerably portrayed throughout the piece - as well as being spoken to by 'Huge Voice' directly "Bitch, look at your body!"; who is assumed to be a God like figure. I feel this is Artaud's way of criticizing the human race as well as exploring our natural instincts as animals. Portraying us completely bare towards the audience, leaving them to develop their own ideas and interpretation of his text and the ideas presented.
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