Brings together essays on art, literature, social problems, drama, and cinema and other prose writings that best represent the French critic's revolutionary thinking

Selected Writings (English and French Edition)

Literature & Fiction

Antonin Artaud

History & Criticism

Farrar. Straus & Giroux

The Peyote Dance

Messianic madman, founder of the Theater of Cruelty (a limiting misnomer), Antonin Artaud's most immediate impact was on Genet, Brecht, Beckett etc. But he continually searched for a suprareality far older & larger than the state of "conscious chaos" & triviality he saw in modern times. In this small book, based on a journey in the mountains of Mexico to an inaccessible tribe who "live as...if they were already dead," & thru the peyote rite they practiced, he found many of the transcendent concepts he had earlier articulated--the Great Ancient Myths he here relates to Plato, the "no God" but Male & Female principles in Nature (which he certainly, castrated man that he was, never found in life), even if later at the end of his peyote transfiguration there will be mention of both the doctrine of Grace & Jesus-Christ-Peyote. He wrote much of this, with additional later comments, in the various Maisons de Sante where he spent his last years. He had always been deranged, & prefiguring Laing, he commented earlier in The Theater & Its Double, "everything that disturbs the mind without causing it to lose its equilibrium is a moving means of expressing the innate pulsations of life." & those innate pulsations--expressed, for example, thru motion & sound, by "act & perpetual emanation"--were his essential contribution. Here on the via dolorosa, further heightened by peyote, there were also the emblems ("trefoils, spears, crosses") of the penitential ritual & symbolism so much a part of this demon-ridden, metaphysical genius "guided by the Invisible" toward an early death. A small but significant addition to the canon & the claque.--Kirkus

History

Helen Weaver [trans.]

Americas

Farrar Straus & Giroux (NY)

The Cenci: A Play.

Dramas & Plays

GROVE PRESS

The surrealist and visionary, Antonin Artaud, cherished a dream to found a new kind of theatre in France that would not be an artistic spectacle, but a communion between spectators and actors. This is a commentary on a selection of key texts by Artaud, founder of the Theatre of Cruelty.

Artaud on Theatre

METHUEN

Founder of the Theatre of Cruelty and a strong influence on Peter Brook, Artaud dedicated his life and sanity to purging the French theatre of its enervating bourgeois tendencies. This book includes his major writings about theatre.

Artaud on Theatre (Plays and Playwrights)

Humor & Entertainment

Methuen Publishing Limited

Collected Works

Calder Publications Ltd

Collected Works: v. 4 (French Surrealism)

Essays & Correspondence

The theatre and its double: Essays; (Signature series)

Drama. This important volume of "Collected Works" includes one of Artaud's most seminal texts, Theatre and Its Double, and his play The Cenci. Also included are appendices, copious notes and his essay "Seraphim's Theater". The Theatre and Its Double, published here in its entirety, remains one of the most radical texts on performance in print today. The lesser-known "Seraphim's Theater" outlines an actor's application of the Taoist principles of fullness and emptiness, and has provided inspiration to actors and directors in experimental and non-naturalistic areas of the theater. The Cenci remains a landmark in twentieth-century theater as an early production of the "theatre of cruelty".

Collected Works: v. 3 (French Surrealism)

Calder & Boyars

A collection of manifestos originally published in 1938, The Theater and Its Double is the fullest statement 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 in order to touch life.”

The Theater and Its Double

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Antonin Artaud. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Antonin Artaud