Peter Stephen Paul Brook was born 21 March 1925, Brook was born in the Turnham Green area of Chiswick, London. He is an
English theatre and film director who was based in France since the early
70s. He won multiple Tony and Emmy Awards, a Laurence Olivier Award, the
Praemium Imperiale, and the Prix Italia. He is called "our greatest
living theatre director".
With the Royal Shakespeare Company, Brook directed the first
English language production of Marat/Sade in 1964. It transferred to Broadway
in 1965 and won the Tony Award for Best Play, and Brook was named Best
Director.
He directed Dr Faustus, his first production, in 1943 at the
Torch Theatre in London, followed at the Chanticleer Theatre in 1945 with a
revival of The Infernal Machine. In 1947, he went to Stratford-upon-Avon as
assistant director on Romeo and Juliet and Love's Labour's Lost. From 1947 to
1950, he was Director of Productions at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.
In 1970, with Micheline Rozan, Brook founded the
International Centre for Theatre Research, a multinational company of actors,
dancers, musicians and others which travelled widely in the Middle East and
Africa in the early 1970s. It has been based in Paris at the Bouffes du Nord
theatre since 1974. In 2008 he made the decision to resign as artistic
director of Bouffes du Nord in 2008.
Antonin Artaud
Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, also known as Antonin Artaud (
4 September 1896 – 4 March 1948), was a French dramatist, poet, essayist,
actor, and theatre director,widely recognised as one of the major figures
of twentieth-century theatre.
Artaud cultivated a great interest in cinema as well,
writing the scenario for the first surrealist film, The Seashell and the
Clergyman (1928), directed by Germaine Dulac. The monk Massieu in Carl Theodor Dreyer's The
Passion of Joan of Arc (1928).
In 1926-28, Artaud produced and directed original works by Vitrac, as well as
pieces by Claudel and Strindberg. The theatre advertised that they would
produce Artaud's play Jet de sang in their 1926-1927 season, but it was never
mounted and was not premiered until 40 years later. The Theatre was extremely
short-lived, but was attended by an enormous range of European artists.
In 1931, Artaud saw Balinese dance performed at the Paris
Colonial Exposition. Although he did not fully understand the intentions and
ideas behind traditional Balinese performance, it influenced many of his ideas
for theatre. Also during this year, Artaud's "First Manifesto for a
Theatre of Cruelty" was published in La Nouvelle Revue Française; it would
later appear as a chapter in The Theatre and Its Double. In 1935, Artaud's
production of his adaptation of Shelley's The Cenci premiered. Les Censi was a
commercial failure, although it employed innovative sound effects-including the
first theatrical use of the electronic instrument the Ondes Martenot—and had a
set designed by Balthus.
After the production failed, Artaud received a grant to
travel to Mexico, where in 1936 he met his first Mexican-Parisian friend, the
painter Federico Cantú, when Federico Cantu gave lectures on the decadence of
Western civilization. Artaud also studied and lived with the Tarahumaran people
and experimented with peyote, recording his experiences, which were later
released in a volume called Voyage to the Land of the Tarahumara. (In 1976, an
English translation was published under the title The Peyote Dance.) The
content of this work closely resembles the poems of his later days, concerned
primarily with the supernatural. Artaud also recorded his horrific withdrawal
from heroin upon entering the land of the Tarahumaras. Having deserted his last
supply of the drug at a mountainside, he literally had to be hoisted onto his
horse and soon resembled, in his words, "a giant, inflamed gum".
Artaud would return to opiates later in life.
In 1937, Artaud returned to France, where he obtained a
walking stick of knotted wood that he believed belonged not only to St.
Patrick, but also Lucifer and Jesus Christ. Artaud traveled to Ireland, landing
at Cobh and travelling to Galway, in an effort to return the staff, though he
spoke very little English and was unable to make himself understood. He would
not have been admitted at Cobh, according to Irish government documents, except
that he carried a letter of introduction from the Paris embassy. The majority
of his trip was spent in a hotel room he was unable to pay for. He was forcibly
removed from the grounds of Milltown House, a Jesuit community, when he refused
to leave. Before deportation he was briefly confined in the notorious Mountjoy
Prison. According to Irish Government papers he was deported as "a
destitute and undesirable alien".[7] On his return trip by ship, Artaud
believed he was being attacked by two crew members and retaliated. He was
arrested and put in a straitjacket.
His best-known work, The Theatre and Its Double, was
published in 1938. This book contained the two manifestos of the Theatre of
Cruelty. There, "he proposed a theatre that was in effect a return to
magic and ritual and he sought to create a new theatrical language of totem and
gesture - a language of space devoid of dialogue that would appeal to all the
senses."[8] "Words say little to the mind," Artaud wrote,
"compared to space thundering with images and crammed with sounds."
He proposed "a theatre in which violent physical images crush and
hypnotize the sensibility of the spectator seized by the theatre as by a
whirlwind of higher forces." He considered formal theatres with their
proscenium arches and playwrights with their scripts "a hindrance to the
magic of genuine ritual."[9]
Final years
The return from Ireland brought about the beginning of the
final phase of Artaud's life, which was spent in different asylums. When France
was occupied by the Nazis, friends of Artaud had him transferred to the psychiatric
hospital in Rodez, well inside Vichy territory, where he was put under the
charge of Dr. Gaston Ferdière. Ferdière began administering electroshock
treatments to eliminate Artaud's symptoms, which included various delusions and
odd physical tics. The doctor believed that Artaud's habits of crafting magic
spells, creating astrology charts, and drawing disturbing images were symptoms
of mental illness. The electroshock treatments created much controversy,
although it was during these treatments—in conjunction with Ferdière's art
therapy—that Artaud began writing and drawing again, after a long dormant
period. In 1946, Ferdière released Artaud to his friends, who placed him in the
psychiatric clinic at Ivry-sur-Seine.[6]
Artaud was encouraged to write by his friends, and interest
in his work was rekindled. He visited an exhibition of works by Vincent van
Gogh which resulted in a study Van Gogh le suicidé de la société [Van Gogh, The
Man Suicided by Society], published by K éditeur, Paris, 1947 which won a
critics' prize.[10] He recorded Pour en Finir avec le Jugement de dieu [To Have
Done With the Judgment of God] between 22 and 29 November 1947. This work was
shelved by Wladimir Porché, the director of the French Radio, the day before
its scheduled airing on 2 February 1948. The performance was prohibited
partially as a result of its scatological, anti-American, and anti-religious
references and pronouncements, but also because of its general randomness, with
a cacophony of xylophonic sounds mixed with various percussive elements. While
remaining true to his Theatre of Cruelty and reducing powerful emotions and
expressions into audible sounds, Artaud had utilized various, somewhat alarming
cries, screams, grunts, onomatopoeia, and glossolalia.
As a result, Fernand Pouey, the director of dramatic and
literary broadcasts for French radio, assembled a panel to consider the
broadcast of Pour en Finir avec le Jugement de dieu. Among the approximately 50
artists, writers, musicians, and journalists present for a private listening on
5 February 1948 were Jean Cocteau, Paul Éluard, Raymond Queneau, Jean-Louis
Barrault, René Clair, Jean Paulhan, Maurice Nadeau, Georges Auric, Claude
Mauriac, and René Char. Although the panel felt almost unanimously in favor of
Artaud's work, Porché refused to allow the broadcast. Pouey left his job and
the show was not heard again until 23 February 1948 at a private performance at
the Théâtre Washington.
In January 1948, Artaud was diagnosed with colorectal
cancer. He died shortly afterwards on 4 March 1948, alone in the psychiatric
clinic, at the foot of his bed, clutching his shoe. It was suspected that he
died from a lethal dose of the drug chloral hydrate, although it is unknown
whether he was aware of its lethality. The clinic is located in Ivry-Sur-Seine,
which is a commune in the southeastern suburbs of Paris. Thirty years later,
French radio finally broadcast the performance of Pour en Finir avec le
Jugement de dieu.
Jerzy Grotowski.
Jerzy Marian Grotowski
11 August 1933 – 14 January 1999) was an innovative Polish theatre director and
theorist whose approaches to acting, training and theatrical production have
significantly influenced theatre today. He was born in Rzeszów, in
South-eastern Poland in 1933 and studied acting and directing at the Ludwik
Solski Academy of Dramatic Arts in Kraków and Russian Academy of Theatre Arts
in Moscow. He debuted as a director in 1959 in Kraków with Eugène Ionesco's
play Chairs and shortly afterwards founded a small Laboratory Theatre in 1959
in the town of Opole in Poland. During the 1960s, the company began to tour
internationally and his work attracted increasing interest. As his work gained
wider acclaim and recognition, Grotowski was invited to work in the United
States and he left Poland in 1982. Although the company he founded in Poland
closed a few years later in 1984, he continued to teach and direct productions
in Europe and America. However, Grotowski became increasingly uncomfortable
with the adoption and adaptation of his ideas and practices, particularly in
the US. So, at what seemed to be the height of his public profile, he left
America and moved to Italy where he established the Grotowski Workcenter in
1985 in Pontedera, near Pisa. At this centre he continued his theatre
experimentation and practice and it was here that he continued to direct
training and private theatrical events almost in secret for the last twenty
years of his life. Suffering from leukemia and a heart condition, he died in
1999 at his home in Pontedera.
Biography
Jerzy Grotowski was born on 11 August 1933 in the city of
Rzeszów, Poland. When the war came in 1939, the strong familial bond that the
family shared was severed. His father entered the war and did not return, and
his mother, brother and himself moved to the small village of Nienadówka. It
was in Nienadówka that the young Grotowski had several essential experiences
that would shape him and his work in the future. His mother was also of great
influence, with her strong opinions on unity and community.
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