Paris, 1932: Antonin Artaud published "Le premier manifeste du Théâtre de la Cruauté" (The First Manifesto of the Theatre of Cruelty) in the literary magazine "La Nouvelle Revue Française".
To make a "theatre of action", Artaud wanted to eliminate the stage and the auditorium and replace them with a single site enclosed by four walls, with the audience seating in the middle of the room, caught in the artists’ cross-fire. The spectators would be exposed to the scenes of violence, cruelty and eroticism. Bombed by grotesque imageries and sounds to which they are absolutely unaccustomed, under the shocking changes in lighting that can produce heat, cold, anger or fear, the spectators would be released from their inner animal instincts and bad thoughts. Through this theatrical exorcist therapy, people who live in a degenerated world will gain a sense of the way the world really is.
Artaud had very radical ideas concerning text in theatre: "Instead of relying on text that are regarded as definitive and as sacred we must first of all put an end to the subjugation of the theater to the text, and rediscover the notion of a kind of unique language halfway between gesture and thought." As for me, I like this idea; my next project could be making a visual dictionary with words "between gesture and thought."