Performance Research

A Journal of the Performing Arts

ISSN: 1352-8165 (Print) 1469-9990 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rprs20

Breathing's Hieroglyphics

Tony Gardner

To cite this article: Tony Gardner (2003) Breathing's Hieroglyphics, Performance Research, 8:2,
109-116, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2003.10871934

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2003.10871934

Published online: 06 Aug 2014.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 30

View related articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rprs20

Download by: [University of Tennessee, Knoxville] Date: 06 June 2016, At: 10:06
 Breathing's Hieroglyphics
Deciphering Artaud's 'Affective Athleticism'
And with the h1emglyph of a bi-eath I can 1-ecover a concept of sacred theatre.
Downloaded by [University of Tennessee, Knoxville] at 10:06 06 June 2016
INBREATH ...
In the closing pages of The Theatre and its Double,
following the manifestos, the speculative compari-
sons between theatre and its succession of 'others'
(the plague, cruelty, alchemy, Balinese perform-
ance, etc.), the correspondence and the reviews,
Artaud turns finally to the question of the actor in
the essay 'An Affective Athleticism', and tests the
weight of his accumulated concerns against the
problems that had preoccupied him more than any
others during the previous decades of his pro-
fessional training and practice. While dealing
ostensibly with the relationship between the actor's
breath, body and mind, as well as the means by
which this relationship is actualized through the
voice, Artaud addresses in this essay the wider
possibilities of comparing processes of training for
actors with those of athletes, and explores how non-
Western models may be accessed in order to expose
the cultural assumptions underpinning these
processes. The essay therefore extends the scope of
Artaud's ambition for a complete revolution in
theatre and binds the theoretical statements of the
preceding texts to issues of practice, while at the
same time it succeeds in disorienting the reader by
combining seductively exact- and exacting- detail
with paradoxical or contradictory instructions. It is
a strategy that, in this case, enables Artaud to
address the difficult task of writing about the per-
forming body without eliding its resistance to any
organizing logic of language or written discourse.
109
Performance Research 8121, pp.109-116 © Taylor & Francis Ltd 2003
Tony Gardner
(OC 4: 163)
Despite these lessons of Surrealism, Pierre
Pasquier has noted the extent to which the
resulting text has been unjustly 'covered-over with
a discreet veil by contemporary critics who appear
to hesitate between complacent silence and evasive
condescension' (Pasquier 1982: 239). In one such
example among many, Grotowski famously argued
that Artaud's proposals were impossible to realize
in practice, despite their theoretical validity, and
dismissed 'An Affective Athleticism' as being
merely 'a sort of poem about the actor' (Grotowski
1969: 174). He thus accepted the view popularized
by collaborators such as Jean-Louis Barrault that
Artaud was completely indifferent to questions of
method or training, or even a shared language of
technique needed to work with performers, which
Barrault argued was the real reason for the failure
of Artaud's production of The Cenci in 1935. And
yet Artaud's response to Barrault at the time was
decisive: faced with the suggestion that he was not
capable of translating his theory into practice,
Artaud stated simply that he would 'find the
necessary exercises to help [actors] discover this
expression, or else it must be shown that I am just a
vulgar theoretician, which I don't believe I am'
(OC 4: 262). 1 Shortly after, Artaud attempted this
task by beginning the first version of what was to
become 'An Affective Athleticism', which must
therefore be read at least partially as an attempt to
intervene in the debates engaging his theatrical
contemporaries concerning the most effective and
 appropriate preparation of the actor for practice.
It was to openly signal this intention that Artaud
described 'An Affective Athleticism' as a 'technical
essay' (OC 4: 162), designed to be applied both in
'the actor's work' and 'the actor's preparation for
his craft' (OC 4: 158); and the complex game
played by Artaud with the discourse of actor
training current in the French theatre of the 1930s
is far from vague in its construction, whatever
Grotowski may have felt about its usefulness. On
the contrary, it is through the magnification of
Downloaded by [University of Tennessee, Knoxville] at 10:06 06 June 2016
detail, or the punctilious care with which Artaud
assembles his 'technical' language for describing a
'science of types of breathing' (OC 4: 158) to be
explored by actors, that the disorienting effect of
the text is generated. The motivating factor of this
strategy was the experience of the body in crisis: a
crisis within and of Artaud's own body first of all,
which not only provided a counterpoint to all of his
speculations on the body of the actor that culmi-
nated in the writing of'An Affective Athleticism',
but also took on a devastating new relevance during
the later years of incarceration at Rodez.
HOLD ...
Paris, 1932: In search of a remedy for his ongoing
health problems, Artaud is referred to Georges
Soulie de Morant for a course of acupuncture
therapy. Although initially intended to ease his
addiction to narcotics, the treatments quickly
capture Artaud's imagination, and the early results
are positive enough to encourage Artaud to explore
further what he considers to be a major discovery,
leading to an at least partial resolution of his
repeated physical crises of the period. He confesses
to Soulie de Morant how 'surprised and amazed' he
has been by the way the treatment is able to
'pinpoint with precision and remarkable accuracy
the deep, debilitating and demoralizing troubles
that have afflicted me for so long' (OC 1**: 127),
rather as if he is experiencing directly the 'exterior-
ization' of 'latent cruelty' causing the 'organic
disorder' (OC 4: 33) in plague-victims described in
his essay 'Theatre and the Plague', written while
undergoing the treatments. Significantly, this is also
the essay in which he first sketches the notion of Q
'primary' and 'secondary' respiration that OJ
...,
underpins 'An Affective Athleticism'. These respi- Cl..
::J
ratory processes interest Artaud because of their ro
dual nature, the way they are able to connect the
automatic with the voluntary, the organic with
thought, the life-principle with the actor's will.
We can keep ourselves from breathing or from thinking,
can speed up our respiration, give it any rhythm we
choose, make it conscious or unconscious at will,
introduce a balance between two kinds of breathing: the
automatic, which is under the direct control of the sym-
pathetic nervous system, and the other, which is subject to
those reflexes of the brain which have once again
become conscious.
(DC 4: 26)
Under the influence of the acupuncture needles,
Artaud's long-standing interest in esotericism and
non-western metaphysics finds a new focus. He
consumes as much material on these subjects as he
can find, and tries to synthesize them into a single
vision over the next few years. Jean-Louis Barrault,
who was both witness to and participant in this
work, recalled: 'He made me read about the
Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Upanishads, the
Bhagavad-Gita, Tantric Yoga, Hatha Yoga,
Milarepa, Fabre d'Olivet, and I don't know what
else besides!' (Barrault 1970). Artaud compiles
notes, tables, diagrams and charts that bring a
dizzying array of cross-cultural references into the
same conceptual space: Chill€se medicine and phil-
osophy (evoking the Taoist 'respiratory gymnastics'
described by Marcel Granet in 1934) and their
Japanese derivatives, ancient Greek history, the
Vedic corpus of Hindu sacred texts, medieval
alchemy, etc. Through this personal compendium
of the world's mysteries, Artaud seems to trace a
thread that is eventually tied into the writing of 'An
Affective Athleticism': the Chinese concept of qi
energy stimulated by the acupuncture needles, the
Japanese ki, the Sanskrit prana, the Greek pneuma
and psyche, the Latin anima and spiritus, all of
which are homologies of 'breath' with different
inflections, 'air', 'wind', 'respiration', 'spirit',
110
 'mind', 'energy', 'vitality', and so on. They recall,
among other things, the etymology of the French
word for 'mind': esprit, from the Latin
spirare, 'to breathe', which also gives us 'inspira-
tion' and 'spirit'. The concept of'mind', Artaud
discovers, has not always or in all places been
Cl
separated from the body, or the organic processes
0
<-
manifested in respiration, as in the dualistic
QJ
western model that divides thought from action,
the mental from the organic, or the voice from the
Downloaded by [University of Tennessee, Knoxville] at 10:06 06 June 2016
breath. Following this linguistic trail, Artaud
Cl comments on the truths that may be held in 'the
c:
etymological origins of speech which, in the midst
..c
+-
of abstract concepts, always evoke a concrete
ro element' (OC 4: 120).
QJ
<-
co
OUTBREATH
Artaud's discoveries during his long period of
research provided a significant body of materials
that enabled him to question the cultural foun-
dations of western theatre practice directly, which
is one of the main writing strategies of The Theatre
and its Double. The turning away from western
culture that is especially evident in 'An Affective
Athleticism' directly mirrored events in Artaud's
life during 1935, which he acknowledged after-
wards as having been 'a cursed year, a year of
deceptions and of Failure' (OC 8: 14). A year,
nevertheless, in which he pursued most vigorously
the twin concerns of 'theatre' and 'culture' that
dominate The Theatre and its Double: when his
interest in the affairs of the French avant -garde
theatre was at its height, and when his plans to
make his journey to Mexico were reaching fruition.
The relationship with Jean-Louis Barrault was also
a decisive factor in 1935: Barrault's Around a
Mother is the only theatre work discussed at any
length in The Theatre and its Double, and the
evidence suggests that Artaud viewed himself as a
mentor to the young actor who had trained at
Charles Dullin's Theatre de I' Atelier, just as
Artaud himself had many years earlier. It was in
direct response to their disagreement over the
outcome of Artaud's production of The Cenci at the
Theatre des Folies-Wagram in May of 1935, on
111
which Barrault briefly assisted, that Artaud wrote
'An Affective Athleticism' in the following months.
The extension of the physical and visual
languages of performance that Barrault was
exploring at that time with Etienne Decroux
greatly impressed Artaud, and explains the analogy
developed in the first half of his essay between
theatre and sport, as well as the central image of the
actor as an 'athlete of the heart' (OC 4: 154 ). But
these affinities only extended so far. Artaud's key
innovation lay in his departure from the discourses
of method and technique that motivated Barrault's
work, even as he was evoking them as a frame for
his own writing. They reflected for Artaud a
redundant European notion of the actor's 'craft' or
metier rooted in classical French theatre training: 'I
do not believe in metier, I loathe everything that is
understood by that word, but I believe in tempera-
ment and in work' (OC 5: 220). He particularly
resisted the western, mechanistic assumptions
behind approaches that reduced questions of
method to issues of training and technique, just as
he had rejected years earlier the 'traditional
exercises of the age-old Gravollet method' (Surel-
Tupin 1985: 49) that had formed the basis of
Dullin's vocal training, the famous technique e/e-
mentaire with the first principle that actors should
'know how to breathe well and at the same time
acquire the science of using one's breathing'
(Dullin 1946: 97) as the basis for working with
text. 2 Artaud's first instinct when faced with such
settled discourses was to attempt to disrupt them,
following his long-held belief that 'everything that
must announce the triumph of a process, of a
system, is bad in itself' (OC 5: 94).
In 1935, his strategy when offering what appears
to be his own treatise on actor-training was two-
fold: first to complicate the tropes and metaphors
shaping attitudes to the acting process and the
actor's formation as a metier in the French theatre
of the period; and second to multiply the cross-
cultural references and non-western schemas of
the body that might be accessed in the pursuit of
new models. In the more complex second half of
his essay, Artaud therefore took a narrow focus on
 the actor's breathing, so fundamental to the French
emphasis on diction and 'the art of good speaking',
and developed it with reference to the alternative
relationships between breath, body and mind that
he had discovered in his researches. Artaud accom-
plished this in an almost parodic gesture, with an
exaggerated use of mechanistic and formulaic
language in the style of pastiche, as a means of
exposing the culture-bound assumptions of his
contemporaries, and especially those operating in
Dullin's technique i!ementaire, which Artaud
Downloaded by [University of Tennessee, Knoxville] at 10:06 06 June 2016
evoked only to indicate the parochial nature of
Dullin's thinking. This strategy of complication is
evident throughout The Theatre and its Double, and
in the case of'An Affective Athleticism', Artaud
proposes the metaphor of athleticism only to over-
burden it- and therefore exceed it- with
seemingly impossible instructions: 'To use his
emotions in the same way as a boxer uses his
muscles, [the actor] must consider a human being
as a Double, like the Kha of the Egyptian
mummies, like an eternal ghost radiating affective
powers' (OC 4: 156). The notion of'athleticism'
thus complicated beyond recognition, Artaud adds
a barrage of technical description that disorients
even further: the 'Kabbalistic' division of
breathing patterns into six groups, each one desig-
nating a different combination of the three primary
'genders', the unqualified use of the Sanskrit terms
guna and tattva as descriptors of a potential
seventh 'combination of breaths', the system of
'voluntary breathing' that relies on a physiological
understanding borrowed from Chinese medicine,
with its 'pressure points' and 'points of localiz-
ation' of breath in the body, and so on. This
chaotic and disorganized catalogue of the perform-
ing body and its functions, with its vertiginous
multiplication of difference and incongruity, was a
deliberate provocation to Barrault and his contem-
poraries, whose reductive approaches to training
Artaud viewed as having 'denatured' the relation-
ship of actors to their bodies: 'No one in Europe
knows how to scream anymore, least of all actors
[who] only know how to talk and have forgotten
that they have bodies' (OC 4: 163).
HOLD ...
Mexico, 1936: Artaud has fled the disappointments
and failures ofParis for the new promise of post-
Revolutionary Mexico. He spends his time in
Mexico City ruminating on his aborted projects
and thwarted ambitions. But this is also a period of
consolidation and the discovery of fresh possi-
bilities. Behind his plans for a journey to the
Mexican interior in search of a people 'uncontami-
nated' by European culture (OC 8: 128) lies a hope
that his still unrealized vision of a Theatre of
Cruelty may be elaborated and given a larger
context of meaning by his exposure to radical
cultural difference, and that his growing enthusi-
asm for his 'affective athleticism' will carry the
authority of these experiences before he finally
shares his proposals with the French public. While
waiting for The Theatre and its Double finally to
appear in print, Artaud clarifies his proposals in
lectures and articles for the Mexican press. Sum-
marizing what he views to have been the broad
changes in the Parisian theatre since 1918, Artaud
argues that many young practitioners have rejected
the example of Jacques Copeau -later dismissed as
'the plastic researches of Copeau, Dullin and Baty'
(OC 8: 206)- in favour of a sustained enquiry into
'the very language of theatre', and look back to a
time when 'the primitive idiom uttered by man was
confused with the organic power of his breathing'
(OC 8: 194 ). He strongly emphasizes his own
attempts to articulate a means for achieving this
goal, amounting to a 'complete breathing
technique' that he claimed 'the young actor Jean-
Louis Barrault ... has begun to study in detail':
In reality [he concludes], this seemingly arid and
ponderous technique expresses something simple and
elementary. But which is essential. Whether one admits it
or not, there is in this a profound idea of culture, and it is
on this essential idea of culture that all the hopes of the
young French thinkers are founded today.
(OC 8: 194)
Artaud writes just one theatre review during this
period, and criticizes the company precisely for
failing to possess this 'physiological technique'
112
 necessary for 'transforming the voice' by means of a
'science of the breath and its points of muscular
support' (OC 8: 200).
Artaud travels to the Mexican interior, and after
a difficult journey he encounters the culture of the
Ranimuri (or Tarahumara). In their rituals, songs
CJ'l
and dances- 'the best form possible of theatre and
0
the only one that can really be justified' (OC 8:
QJ
186)- Artaud deliberately mis-recognizes traces of
:::c: 'the ancient Mexicans [who] did not separate
culture from a personal knowledge, spread
Downloaded by [University of Tennessee, Knoxville] at 10:06 06 June 2016
CJ'l throughout the entire organism' (OC 8: 162-3). He
c
marvels at their preoccupation with cultural and
.c
.... philosophical matters 'to the point of a kind of
ru physiological possession' (OC 9: 71), rather like the
QJ
Balinese 'metaphysicians of disorder' (OC 4: 78)
CD
that he had described years earlier. The experience
inspires him to re-write his preface to The Theatre
and its Double under the title 'Theatre and Culture'.
In it he calls for, among other things, an 'applied
culture' or a 'culture-in-action, growing within us
like a new organ, a sort of second breath' (OC 4:
12). The revolution in theatre that Artaud dreams
of must begin first of all in the bodies of perform-
ers, at the threshold between culture and nature,
the organic and the metaphysical: 'I call organic
culture a culture based on the mind in relation to
the organs, and the mind seeped in the organs,
responding to one another at the same time' (OC 8:
164). And the mechanism for this transformation,
or at least its concrete focus and vehicle, was to be
the living breath of the actor as conceptualized
within his broader notion of 'affective athleticism'.
INBREATH ...
Barrault made his own effort in future years to
incorporate Artaud's emphasis on the performer's
breathing into his own practice. Addressing a
Unesco Congress in 1959 on the theme of'The
Contribution of Sport to Professional Perfection
and Cultural Development' with a paper entitled
'The Actor: Affective Athlete', Barrault developed
the analogy between sport and theatre by observing
that 'all corporeal expression in the theatre, in
common with all corporeal effort in sport, proceeds
113
exclusively from respiratory exercise and the spinal
column' (Barrault 1959: 86). One could also point
to the evidence of the breathing exercises and tech-
niques described in his essay 'An Attempt at a
Little Treatise on the Alchemy of the Theatre'
(1949, a year after Artaud's death) springing from
his general view of respiration as a 'whole magical
laboratory in itself' in which actors might discover
through experiment a 'veritable sol-fa of breathing,'
or a 'so/fige respiratoire', which when linked to a
'so/fige corporef could form the 'point of departure
for a genuine technical training'; or even the later
'Alchemy of the Human Body' (1972, in Barrault
1974 ), with its simple observation that 'the human
body possesses, physically, a language of breathing
and a language of gesture,' and that any approach to
training or performance must aim to re-establish
their lost connection: 'This artificial recreation of
what happens in life', summarizes Barrault, 'is the
art of breathing' (Barrault 1974: 86).
Yet while detailing how automatic motor
processes might be transformed into material for
art by relearning how to breathe, Barrault appeared
to have overlooked a fundamental feature of
Artaud's vision. He attempted to bring order and
completeness to Artaud's proposals by aligning
them with more dominant discourses of actor
training and the performing body, whereas Artaud
chose to place his writing on 'affective athleticism'
quite consciously alongside his figuration of the
actor in a state of physical and mental crisis- as a
'plague-victim' experiencing 'organic disorder' and
'the exteriorization of latent cruelty'- in a way that
put clear distance between his approach and the
general consensus that had been established under
the influence of Jacques Copeau concerning the
most 'appropriate' methods of actor training.
Artaud may have agreed with Copeau's observation
that the 'pharisaic' antipathy towards the theatre of
the type expressed by St Augustine (evoked in
Artaud's own essay 'The Theatre and the Plague')
had its origins in the fact that 'the actor is doing
something forbidden: he is playing with his
humanness and making sport of it' (Copeau 1990:
73), and even Copeau's affirmation of Hamlet's
 horror (II: ii) at the resulting 'monstrosity' of the
actor at both mental and organic levels, but Artaud
could not accept Copeau's next assumption: that
training and technique should attempt to rid actors
of this monstrosity as a precondition for the kind of
'professional perfection' evoked by Barrault. On
the contrary, Artaud suggested that, since the actor
in training must always face this combined physical
and spiritual crisis, then the effects of this crisis
should be extended deliberately into performance
as 'monstrosity'. Impropriety should thus be recog-
Downloaded by [University of Tennessee, Knoxville] at 10:06 06 June 2016
nized as part of the very culture of acting itself,
nurtured as a foundation for that 'culture-in-action,
growing within us like a new organ, a sort of
second breath' announced at the opening of The
Theatre and its Double.
HOLD ...
Rodez, late 19-15: With the end of his 9-year incar-
ceration finally on the horizon, Artaud makes a
premature bid for freedom from the asylum at
Rodez. In the absence of real liberty, Artaud
pursues the next most desirable goal: intellectual
freedom from Dr Ferdiere, which he is partially
able to achieve by recovering ideas that had seemed
long-abandoned. At the forefront of these is his
notion of 'affective athleticism' developed almost
exactly 10 years earlier: complaining in a letter to
Jean Paulhan that, despite having been 'set free' by
Ferdiere, 'no one has bothered to come to fetch
me', he confides that in a situation where 'I never
know what Dr Gaston Ferdiere might do' -the
threat of more electroshocks being ever-present- 'I
am always in danger of being treated as crazy and
disturbed when I work here, either with gestures,
or with chanting, while walking, or in attitudes on
my tdfective athleticism' (OC II: 128). Ferdiere
presents Artaud with a stark choice to 'give up your
magic or it's electroshocks for you' (Ferdiere 1971:
30), but Artaud resists Ferdiere's authority to
conflate description with diagnosis, and his earlier
theoretical writings become his principal weapon in
this conflict. 3 Most significantly, Artaud explains
that he is attempting to 'reconstitute' the 'internal
tearing-apart of the being that I am', precipitated
by an adolescent 'occult sickness which is not a Gl
sickness of the brain or mind', through a process OJ
which he describes as being accomplished 'by Cl..
::::J
equally occult methods of using the breath (see (1)
affective athleticism)' (OC II: 125-6). These
'occult methods' form a practice that, according to
Artaud, 'the monstrous villainy of the asylum
doctors has wanted to stop me from using', and yet
through them he claims to be able to achieve results
'by performing them in my secret way, which they
have never tolerated, accusing me of doing magic
and being sick when they saw me investigating my
body with my mouth, thought and hand for the
internal actions of the breath similar to those I tried
to describe or express [in the 1935 essay on]
affective athleticism' (OC 11: 126).
At stake is not only the end of Artaud's intellec-
tual bondage to Ferdiere before his physical release
from the asylum, but also his ability to define his
actions using terms of his own choosing, outside of
the discourse of psychiatry. It seems, in Artaud's
eyes at least, that he has become the casualty of a
confrontation between irreconcilable contexts:
French art and French psychiatry, the avant-garde
Parisian stage and the asylum ward: 'Since I am
doing all of this in a lunatic asylum a doctor can just
feel free to call me a madman if he doesn't like what
I am doing, like a poet's jealous critic who would
like to see him locked up' (OC 11: 128).
OUTBREATH ...
The identification with Van .Gogh notwithstanding,
Artaud's account of his conflict with Ferdiere
underlines the great importance that he placed on a
practice he continued to describe as his 'affective
athleticism', and suggests that his defence of it was
part of an effort to re-establish continuity with his
work of the pre-Rodez years as the foundation for
future ambitions that would eventually culminate
in such projects as his late works for radio. Remark-
ably, Artaud was able to sustain these ambitions
while experiencing the most extreme conflation of
the social power invested in medical science with
the type of punitive authority exerted on the bodies
of social 'others' that was to inspire Foucault's later
114
 analyses: electroshock therapy, still in its experi-
mental stages in the 1940s. The idea just as much as
the reality of the many electroshock 'treatments'
that Artaud received at Rodez held a particular
horror for him: he conceived of them as mental
earthquakes that prompted 'lapses ... that are
beyond my control' (OC 9: 30) and loss of self-
identity as well as memory. These were in fact a
QJ
recognized therapeutic goal of the procedures: in
her study of the history of the treatments, Florence
de Meredieu has argued that the 'disruption of the
corporeal schema' (1996: 143) that resulted from
Downloaded by [University of Tennessee, Knoxville] at 10:06 06 June 2016
en
c
electroshocks had its origins in a mechanistic world
..c
..... view through which the social bodies constructed
ru
QJ
by medicine and scien~e are subjected to the same
physical operations as machines or automatons,
CD
with which they are largely equated- a point that
Artaud had made repeatedly in his earlier works. It
was from within this general paradigm, Meredieu
argues, that practitioners were able to specify the
effects of electrical currents on the organism and
psyche; in particular, that they could be forcibly
reduced to a 'ground state' of functions, from
which 'proper' physiological and mental responses
could then be reconstructed.
In this connection, Meredieu notes the historical
coincidence between the development of scientific
Taylorism- 'the rationalization of human work
movements and the elimination of all useless
motion'- and electroshock theory of the period,
which placed the psychiatrist in the position of a
technician-scientist who 'occupies himself with sta-
tistics, graph curves, the precise inscription of
movements and functions of the human body within
"organs" that surpass it' (Meredieu 1996: 155). The
consequences of such a view of the human organism
were shatteringly obvious to Artaud, and his revival
of the earlier notion of 'affective athleticism' was
intended as a deliberate strategy of physical resist-
ance to it: 'Society has power over us, clearly, but
where does it come from if not the adherence of all
of us to society's power, and this is not a fact but an
idea. It is a simple, false idea of our bodies that has
oppressed us for so long, and what are we waiting
for to explode it?' (OC 11: 273).
115
AND RELAX ...
In a text written while at Rodez, Artaud concluded
of the 'born philosophers' he had encountered in
Mexico: 'The Tarahumara do not attach the same
importance to the body as we Europeans ... they
have a completely different notion of it' (OC 9: 15).
The benefits of proposing that cultural differences
might extend also to alternative means of conceptu-
alizing the body were obvious to Artaud at Rodez,
where he had become a victim of the 'simple, false
idea of our bodies' operating within western
culture. From Artaud's point of view, this predomi-
nantly mechanistic and scientific framework for
describing psycho-physiological functions only
permitted relationships such as that connecting the
breath, body and mind of the actor to be conceived
in terms of what jacques Derrida has described as a
'metaphysics of proper subjectivity' (1978: 183)
that also defined Artaud's speech and writing as
'improper' or 'polluting', and therefore authorized
the total organic intervention of the electroshock
'cure'. Artaud's belief that such metaphysical
assumptions had been embodied in the actor-
training systems of Copeau, Dullin or Barrault was
merely confirmed by his experience at Rodez. It
was only in the context of this metaphysics that
Dullin could have prescribed a technique elbnentaire
that was ultimately designed to evacuate the
'poison' of the actor's innate 'insincerity' and build
from scratch a 'complete actor' (Dullin 1946: 82);
or could Copeau have attempted to 'renormalize'
(1990: 24) what he viewed as the actor's natural
'monstrosity' through technique and the 'proper
training' that was presumed to result in a 'con-
dition of serenity, calm, and unaffected assurance
that can be seen in well-constituted, healthy, and
properly experienced human beings' (1955: 49).
When Artaud opposed these orthodoxies with
his own 'improper' valorization of the body in
crisis, and through his 'affective athleticism' articu-
lated a process by which a reductive vision of the
actor's breathing body might be 'exploded', he was
laying the foundation for the greater part of his
later work: from the paintings he described as
'breathing machines' or 'anatomies in action' to the
 glossolalic complexities of his works for radio, and
especially his final theoretical writings on relations
between the actor, science and anatomy. In the last
of these before his death, 'Theatre and Science'
( 1947), Artaud continued to lambast the 'anatomi-
cal order' that conspires to validate 'the existence as
well as the duration of current society', and argued
that theatre is the proper site of resistance both to
this order and to the metaphysics that perpetuates
it, 'a crucible of real fire and meat in which
anatomically,/ through stamping of bones,/ limbs
and syllables,/ bodies are remade' (in Virmaux
Downloaded by [University of Tennessee, Knoxville] at 10:06 06 June 2016
1970: 264). It is from this attempted 'remaking' of
the actor's body that, in the final analysis, Artaud's
hieroglyphics of breathing may best be deciphered:
by proposing a discipline that both extended and
directed the opening of the actor's body to differ-
ence, incongruity and excess, Artaud was also
dreaming of an end to the western, metaphysical
imperative that structures the actor's experience of
the body purely as a function of 'proper subjectiv-
ity'. As he concluded in his work for radio To Have
Done With the Judgement of God, completed shortly
before his death in 1948: 'When you will have made
[man] a body without organs, then you will have
liberated him from all of his automatisms and given
him his true freedom' (13: 104).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The original research for this article was supported by
the University of Manchester Department of Drama and
the British Academy. Special thanks must go to George
Taylor, Claude Schumacher and Tony Jackson.
NOTES
I Quotations from Artaud's writings are taken from the
French editions of his collected works, Oeuvres completes,
Paris: Gallimard, in the following editions: I**: 1970, 4:
1964,5: 1979,8: 1980,9: 1979, 11: 1974, 13: 1974. Refer-
ences to the collected works are given in the main text as
OC followed by volume number; all translations are my
own unless otherwise indicated.
2 Paul Gravollet was the author of the 1894 treatise on
the 'mechanical school' of declamation outlining
exercises in 'the art of good speaking' and 'regulation of
the breathing' that was commended by the instructors of
the Comedie-Franc,:aise acting school (see Gravollet 1894:
vii). The approach was adapted by Charles Dullin for his
technique dimentaire in a way that Artaud never accepted,
even as his student in the early 1920s: Dullin commented Q
after Artaud's death on his 'exemplary' record of involve- [lJ
....,
ment in the Atelier school's daily work being marred only
by the 'mechanical diction exercises in which he energet- ::::J
ically refused to participate' (Dullin 1969: 299). ro
3 Ferdiere clearly refutes this charge in his own
account, but the events of October 1943 seem to suggest
otherwise: when Artaud sent his first new text in 6 years
to Paulhan, under the title Kahbar Enis-Kathar esti,
which included extensive examples of his new glossolalic
language that, as Thomas Maeder noted, 'derived its
meaning from the breathing techniques described in his
"An Affective Athleticism"' (Maeder 1978: 242), the
doctor ordered another series of a dozen electroshocks.
REFERENCES
Barrault, Jean-Louis (1949) Rejlexions sur le theatre,
Paris: Jacques Vautrain.
- - (1959) 'L'Acteur: "Athlete Affectif" ', Cahiers
Renaud-Barrault 29: 86-95.
- - (1970) 'Conviction et malaise dans le theatre con-
temporain', Cahiers Renaud-Barrault 71.
- - (1974) MemoriesfiJr Tomorrow, London: Thames
and Hudson.
Copeau, Jacques (1955) Notes sur le comedien, Paris:
Michel Brient.
- - (1990) 'An Actor's Thoughts on Diderot's
"Paradoxe'", in]. Rudlin and N. Paul (eds) Copeau:
Texts on Theatre, London: Routledge. Extracted and
translated from Jacques Copeau (1929) Rejlexions d'un
wmedien sur le Paradoxe de Diderot, Paris: Pion.
Derrida, Jacques (1978) 'La parole soufflee', in Writing
and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, London: Routledge,
pp. 169-95.
Dullin, Charles (1946) Souvenirs et notes de travail d'un
acteur, Paris: Odette Lieutier.
- - (1969) Ce sont les dieux qu 'if nous faut, Paris:
Gallimard.
Ferdiere, Gaston (1971) ']'ai so~ne Antonin Artaud', La
Tour de Feu 112: 24-33.
Gravollet, Paul (1894) Declamation: ecole du mecanisme,
Paris: Paul Ollendorf.
Grotowski, Jerzy (1969) Towards a Poor Theatre,
London: Methuen.
Maeder, Thomas ( 1978) Antonin Artaud, trans. ].
Delpech, Paris: Pion.
Meredieu, Florence (1996) Sur l'ilectrochoc: le cas
Antonin Artaud, Paris: Blusson.
Pasquier, Pierre ( 1982) 'Athletisme affectif et ascese
blanche chez Antonin Artaud', Revue d'Histoire du
Theatre 34(3): 237-48.
Sure!-Tupin, Monique ( 1985) 'Charles Dullin et son
ecole', Revue d'Histoire du Theatre 37(1): 36-66.
Virmaux, Alain (1970) Antonin Artaud et le theatre, Paris:
Seghers.
116