Truth-Seeker’s Allowance: Digitising Artaud

Truth-Seeker’s Allowance: Digitising Artaud
by Steve Dixon

[the problematic concept of the truth. what is truth?]

p.21
practicing multimedia truth-theater [this subtitle deal with dualities and the dividual concepts]

As I recall, neither did we the performers; the notion of truth was not fundamental at the time and I must confess it has only now occured to me, several years later.

Our use of the actor on stage and the double on screen, the performers acting with and against themselves at worst offers the actor two bites of the cherry, and at best opens the possibilities of some synergetic alchemy which might approach this notion of flame-licked delirium.

p.23
The use of technology in creating the projection enables each actor (in video recording) to reach a point of acting truth through focussed preparation and multiple takes where they concentrate on only one outcome – a moment of horror – rather than the many and varied ones required in the course of a live performance.

… ‘dramatic illusion is never . . . the illusion of reality; it is always imaginative illusion’ (1936: 166 Allardyce Nicoll, Film and Theater)

Nicoll’s ‘ideas are interesting in contrasting film as ‘truthful’, ‘complex’, and ‘real’ with the falsity, simplicity, and illusion of theater.

p.24
media projections do not enhance the intellectual power or visual spectacle of theatre, rather their technological intrusion is alien; the two forms are aesthetic enemies. [see S. Sontag, 1966]

A commonplace of discussion has it that film and theatre are distinct and even antithetical arts, each giving rise to its own standards of judgement and canons of form. (1966: 24 [‘Film and Theater’, TDR; Tulane Drama Review Vol. 2, no. 1: 24-37])

p.25
[screen imagery (inner) - live actor (outer)]
In his ‘theater of the future’ the live actor would thus represent the character’s outer self and the screen imagery the inner world of imagination, subconscious, and dream: ‘the two worlds that together make up the world we live in’.

At the all root of all living is a conscious of our essential duality. … The stage used objectively, the screen used subjectively … [the schizophrenic] The simultaneous expression of the two sides of our nature is an exact parallel to our life process. We are living in two worlds at the same time – an outer world of actually and an inner world of vision.

p.26
Breton positions surrealism ideologically as ‘a belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association hitherto neglected, in the omnipotence of the dream, in the disinterested play of thought’, …

p.29
…, the insult was a forceful means ‘to explode the social order . . . We exalted passion, mystification, black humour, the insult and the call to the abyss’

… the truth that may me enshrined in some sublime aesthetic image.

p.30
For Nietzsche, the distinctions between ‘appearance’ and ‘reality’ expounded by both Platonism and science constituted a false and hardened ‘mythology’ of dualisms (…), whereas in his view there was only one world, the world we find around us. … for a synthesis where the two elements – stage and screen – are not Platonic or scientific dualisms, but make up a new ‘one world’ of conjoined ‘mobile metaphors’ capable of expressing nothing more, and nothing less, than truth.