Theatre Studies - Artaud
Theatre studies – ‘The Connections between Steven Burkoff’s work & Artaud’
Like Artaud, Berkoff is very much into stylising and surrealism, finding the dark side of things. He thinks ‘Realism’ can become deadening, Berkoff very much like Artaud wanted to break away from the norms of Western Theatre. Berkoff believed it was too much like films and soaps. Artaud was much the same he thought the audience was engaged enough and wasn’t ‘affected’ a great deal by the performances.
Berkoff believed that you don’t need anything than more than ‘utter simplicity’, and that the actors are a key role, any set, in the case of Metamorphosis purely mime and no dialogue, or costume will detract from the actual art of acting. Artaud also thought this as he tried to create a language of sounds, exploiting single words to find deeper meanings. We did exercises to explore these miming using only basic sounds. One scenario was a hospital scene where each character used one word, my word for example been head doctor was ‘incision’ I found many more parts of this word that I would of usually. Like ‘in’ obviously, ‘cisssss’ sounds like a drill, ‘sion’ I thought sounded very harsh and I used this when I had to discipline the other doctor.
