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
Cruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes the harsh and uncompromising nature of theatre that can evoke strong emotions.
Antonin Artaud suggests that true cruelty in theatre involves a relentless commitment to intensity and clarity in performance. It reflects how the art form demands absolute focus and discipline from its creators, leading to powerful, often challenging experiences for both the actors and the audience.
Themes
TheatreArtCrueltyDecisivenessDiligence
In practice
Example use cases
In a theatre class discussing the emotional impact of performances.
More from Antonin Artaud
All quotes →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.
Antonin ArtaudRead
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.
Antonin ArtaudRead
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.
Antonin ArtaudRead
A real theatrical experience shakes the calm of the senses, liberates the compressed unconscious and drives towards a kind of potential revolt . . .
Antonin ArtaudRead
In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the Peyote tells us, where to find it.
Antonin ArtaudRead
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