On Artaud and Brecht, some post-class thoughts

As Ellen and I talked yesterday after class, it occurred to us that two things might be useful: an articulation of the context within which Brecht and Artaud were writing and some examples of how their work has sifted down and worked.

Both Brecht (1898-1956) and Artaud (1896-1948) were responding to a theatre world dominated by melodrama and bourgeois entertainment and an inner (for Artaud) and outer (for Brecht) world that was screaming out for greater intervention. Artaud was in and out of asylums and on and off opium. This is not to diminish his ideas, only to offer insight as to how he seemed to see flames and anguish that he believed theatre could and should create and stimulate. Brecht was writing in (as Ellen put it) the crescendo of the Third Reich, where propaganda (what we would now call "performance") was generating a torrent of agreement for what was becoming the Holocaust.

For Brecht, it is pivotal that spectators cast their vote; that they remain able to think: "this happened, but something else could have happened." I do not believe that he did not want his spectators to feel, only that he wanted their feelings to inspire action. He wanted people to see the forces (gov't, military, capitalism) that was causing the character's pain, not just think (again, as Ellen put it) "it's great not to be noticed by the gods!"

The above clip is a snippet from Anna Deavere Smith's recent performance Let Me Down Easy in which she plays different characters, starting (in this clip) with Ann Richards. She does not disappear into her characters and she does not go into a trance or make her audience go into a trance. She portrays people of different races, ages, abilities, and genders; the audience remains aware of the virtuosity and (I believe) compassion of Smith's attempt to channel them.

The clip I was going to show is this Yoko Ono piece. It's hardly "signaling through flames," (those interested in more abject types of performance art might be interested in Schneeman, or Tim Miller, or Orlan) but it is a way of insisting that something is happening.