AAS (18) - Artaud & Salvador Dali

To begin today's lesson, we all presented our research on Artaud. I particularly liked what Lewis put in his presentation as I thought it summed up Artaud's intentions quite nicely: "He wanted the audience to expel destructive feelings and experience the joy that the social order forced them to inhibit". One word that popped up in almost all of the presentations was the idea of "surrealism". A definition of the adjective "surreal" from Dictionary.com is "having the disorienting, hallucinatory quality of a dream; unreal; fantastic".

Our stimulus for creating a short Artaud inspired piece is a
painting by Salvador Dali. This painting is called "Impressions of Africa" and was painted in 1938. We were split into two groups and told that we would create a short piece using some of Artaud's techniques. We weren't told the title of the painting so we were not influenced - we had to create our piece from the painting rather than the painting's title. The group I am in consists of both Ollie's, James and Charlie. As we are completing and then performing this next lesson and Ollie Marshall won't be in (as he has an open day at a college), Ollie was our director.

Our first step to creating our piece was to all say what we saw first when we looked at the painting. Charlie saw a man on the run, I saw someone crawling, James saw a ghost and Ollie saw a werewolf. We then thought that the ghost-like woman above the painter's head could be a distant memory of a woman he was close to.

We decided that we definitely wanted to experiment with the actor-audience relationship, as this was one of Artaud's main conventions. We decided we wanted our audience to sit in-the-round but separately from each other. We wanted to perform both in the circle and behind the audience. By performing within the circle, everybody would see what was going on; whilst by performing sections behind the audience and by constantly changing positions, the audience would feel disorientated and vulnerable. We also wanted to experiment with black-outs. This would enable us to change positions quickly to confuse the audience and make them feel vulnerable as they wouldn't know what was about to happen next - a little bit like being on a roller-coaster in the dark, not knowing what is around the corner but enjoying the suspense.

After discussing what we thought of when we first saw the painting, we decided we would work with the idea that Charlie's character was grieving over the loss of his mother and we could flashback to her death. However, we are not 100% sure on what we shall do yet, but we shall continue working on this next lesson.