(2) Interview with Paule Thévenin, Paris, September 1988.
(3) Antonin Artaud, Pour En Finir Avec Le Jugement De Dieu, in Oeuvres Complètes, Volume XIII, Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 1974, page 84.
(4) Working notes (November 1947) towards Pour En Finir Avec Le Jugement De Dieu, page 273.
(5) Pour En Finir Avec Le Jugement De Dieu, pages 91–92.
(6) Antonin Artaud, letter to Wladimir Porché, 2 February 1948, Oeuvres Complètes, Volume XIII, page 131.
(7) Interview with Paule Thévenin, Paris, March 1987.
(8) Antonin Artaud, letter to Paule Thévenin, 24 February 1948, Oeuvres Complètes, Volume XIII, page 146.
(9) ibid, page 146.
(10) Introductory note (November 1947) to Pour En Finir Avec Le Jugement De Dieu, page 69.
(11) Antonin Artaud, Le Théâtre De La Cruauté (a text from November 1947, intended to be recorded as part of Pour En Finir Avec Le Jugement De Dieu, but excluded due to time constraints), Oeuvres Complètes, Volume XIII, page 110.
(12) Antonin Artaud, Le Théâtre Et La Science (July 1947), L’Arbalète, Décines, issue 13, summer 1948, page 15.
(13) Antonin Artaud, Ci-Gît (November 1946), Oeuvres Complètes, Volume XII, 1974, page 95.
(14) Le Théâtre De La Cruauté, page 116.
(15) At least in its original form of the 1960s, Tatsumi Hijikata’s “Ankoku Butoh” (“Dance Of Utter Darkness”), accords exactly with Artaud’s ultimate conception of the dancing human body in a state of violent self-interrogation, traversed simultaneously by sensations of ecstasy and annihilation. Much of the initial imagery of Butoh emerged from the devastated Tokyo of the end of the Second World War, during which tens of thousands of the city’s inhabitants had been reduced to ashes by American and British firebombing, leaving only a few fragments of surviving buildings – such a complete return to zero necessarily resulted in a crucial sensation of liberation and sexual experimentation, manifested in Tokyo’s extreme forms of art, film and sex of the ensuing riotous decades. Hijikata (1928–1986), a close collaborator of other Japanese 1960s avant-garde legends such as Shuji Terayama, Eikoh Hosoe, Kazuo Ohno and Tadanori Yokoo, read Artaud’s work assiduously as soon as it appeared in Japanese translation; another of his vital preoccupations was with the dolls created by Hans Bellmer. In 1971, he wrote an essay on Artaud entitled Artaud’s Slipper, but this intense engagement with Artaud’s work primarily manifested itself in his dance performances such as Revolt Of The Flesh (1968) and Story Of Smallpox (1972), and in his filmic and photographic collaborations with Eikoh Hosoe, who was also responsible for the infamous book of photographs of Yukio Mishima, Killed By Roses, from 1963, in which Mishima’s body is depicted in erotic contortions of bondage and torture. In 1984, Hijikata heard Artaud’s recording To Have Done With The Judgement Of God, which the writer Kuniichi Uno had brought back from Paris, where he had been collaborating with Gilles Deleuze. As a result, Hijikata worked on a performance based in part on To Have Done With The Judgement Of God with the choreographer Min Tanaka, but both were dissatisfied with the result. Hijikata was formulating a new work based on his engagement with Artaud and his own revolutionary conception of the human body in crisis, tentatively entitled Experiment With Artaud, when he suddenly died of liver failure in Tokyo in January 1986 (much of his work towards the project had entailed five-day non-stop drinking bouts in the labyrinthine bar districts of Tokyo as he formulated his ideas with Uno). In February 1998, Min Tanaka undertook a series of three unique performances in Tokyo based on Artaud’s scenario The Conquest Of Mexico, which undoubtedly marked the most astonishing choreographic experiment with Artaud’s work to date. Interviews with Eikoh Hosoe, Min Tanaka, Akiko Motofuji, Kuniichi Uno, Tokyo, July 1997–July 1998.
(16) Antonin Artaud, Le Théâtre De Séraphin (a text about screaming from 1935, intended for inclusion in the collection of theatre essays, Le Théâtre Et Son Double, but eventually excluded), Oeuvres Complètes, Volume IV, 1978, pages 178–179.
(17) Edvard Munch, text (from around 1897–1898 or 1905) accompanying his sequence of works entitled The Scream, in Bente Torjusen, Words And Images Of Edvard Munch, Thames and Hudson, London, 1989, page 136.
(18) Francis Bacon, interview from May 1966, in David Sylvester, The Brutality Of Fact: Interviews With Francis Bacon, Thames and Hudson, London, 1988, page 48.
(19) ibid, page 34.
Table of Contents
ARTAUD: THE SCREAMING BODY
credits
INTRODUCTION
1 : Extremities of the Mind: Artaud’s Film Projects 1924–35
2 : A New Anatomy: Artaud’s Drawings 1937–48
3 : The Screaming Body: Artaud’s Sound Recordings 1946–48
BACK COVER
Artaud: The Screaming Body: Film, Drawings, Recordings 1924-1948 Page 10