Unit 1 - Skills development in performing arts

The 3 main practitioners in performing arts:

Antonin Artaud:

Artaud is best known as he proposed the ‘Theatre of cruelty’ idea. Antonin was born in France and was an actor, writer and costume designer. He believed that there should be an active audience involved in theatre productions. He didn’t mean this as in audience participation, but he wanted the audience to leave the theatre feeling disturbed by the performance they had just watched. However, he thought that to make this possible, there should be a greater emphasis on elements such as lighting, costume and movement and that text or script were nowhere near as important as the other elements. He wanted to be able to show pain and disturbance through all elements apart from text. His main focus was to try and disturb the audience as much as he possibly could. In some performances he had audience member crying, screaming and some being sick.

Konstantin Stanislavasiki

Stanislavasiki believed that theatre productions and performances should be as naturalistic as possible. He thought that it was essential that when an actor was playing a character, they needed know every detail about their character whether it be on or off stage. He developed a performance process known as ‘method acting’ which gets the actors to put themselves in the character’s situation and try to think of a situation that they have been in which is similar to this. This made the performances more realistic as the actors could relate to the characters. 

Jerzy Grotowski 

Grotowski was a great believer in physical theatre. He believed that using anything but text would create a very good theatre production. In some of the performances that he directed, there was no speech used at all. He felt strongly that there should be a great connection between the actors and the audience. His most successful productions were the ones where he got the actors to use every single part of their bodies to show emotion. When he was growing up he was inspired by Stanislavaski. Grotowski came up with the term ‘Poor Theatre’ meaning somewhere where a piece of drama can be performed but there are not many props available. This meant that they rely heavily on the physical movement within the performance.