I have need of angels. Enough hell has swallowed me for too many years. But finally understand this--I have burned up one hundred thousand human lives already, from the strength of my pain.
Antonin ArtaudRead
The actor is an athlete of the heart.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the emotional vigor and dedication required in acting, likening it to the physical demands of athletics.
Antonin Artaud's quote, 'The actor is an athlete of the heart,' suggests that performing arts, particularly acting, require intense emotional labor and resilience akin to the physical exertion needed in sports. It emphasizes that an actor must train and condition their emotional responses to connect authentically with their roles, much like an athlete hones their physical capabilities to excel in sports.
In practice
During a theater workshop, I quoted Artaud to inspire actors to dive deeper into their emotional performances.
I have need of angels. Enough hell has swallowed me for too many years. But finally understand this--I have burned up one hundred thousand human lives already, from the strength of my pain.
Cruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness.
I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat.
If our life lacks a constant magic it is because we choose to observe our acts and lose ourselves in consideration of their imagined form and meaning, instead of being impelled by their force.
It is thus that the few rare lucid well-disposed people who have had to struggle on the earth find themselves at certain hours of the day or night in the depth of certain authentic and waking nightmare states, surrounded by the formidable suction, the formidable oppression of a kind of civic magic which will soon be seen appearing openly in social behavior.
A real theatrical experience shakes the calm of the senses, liberates the compressed unconscious and drives towards a kind of potential revolt . . .
All that we did, all that we said or sang must come from contact with the soil.
The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of view, I think. All that we can hope for is to put some order into ourselves.
When I'm writing, I'm trying to immerse myself in the chaos of an emotional experience, rather than separate myself from it and look back at it from a distance with clarity and tell it as a story. Because that's how life is lived, you know?
It's not that the creative act and the critical act are simultaneous. It's more like you blurt something out and then analyze it.
The human soul needs actual beauty even more than bread.
I like simplicity. I like using natural sources. I like images to look natural - as though somebody sitting in a room by a lamp is being lit by that lamp.
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