Artaud 2

There is a horde of ritual gestures in it to which we have no
key, seeming to obey a very precise, musical indication, with some-
thing added that does not usually belong to music and seems to be
aimed at encircling thought, hounding it down, leading it into a
sure, labyrinthine system. In fact everything in this theatre is
assessed with loving, unerring attention to detail. Nothing is left
either to chance or individual initiative. It is a kind of sublime
dance where the dancers are actors first and foremost.
We see them repeatedly carry out a kind of reanimation at a
measured tread. Just as they appear to be lost in a hopelessly
intricate maze of beats and we feel they are about to fall prey to
confusion, they have their own way of regaining their balance, a
peculiar arching, leg twisting stance which gives the impression of
a wet cloth about to be wrung to music - suddenly the floating
rhythm ends, the beat becomes clear on three final steps, inevitably
bringing them back to centre stage.
Everything is just as ordered and just as impersonal with them.
Not one rippling muscle, not one rolling eye does not seem to be-
long to a kind of deliberate accuracy directing everything, through
which everything happens. The odd thing is that in this systematic
depersonalisation, in the purely muscular facial expressions, like
feature masks, everything produces, conveys the utmost eflect.
We are seized with a kind of terror when we think of these
mechanical beings whose happiness and pain seem not to be their
own, but to obey tried and tested rituals as if governed by higher
intellects. In the last analysis, this impression of a higher, controlled
life is what strikes us most about this show, like a profane ritual.
It has the solemnity of a holy ritual - the hieratic costumes give
each actor a kind of dual body, dual Iimbs - and in his costume, the
stiff stilted artist seems merely his own effigy. Beside the booming,
pounding musical rhythm - there is a sustained hesitating fragile



music which seems to grind the most precious metals, where springs
of water bubble up as in a state of nature, where columns of
insects march through the plants, where the sound of light itself
appears to have been picked up, where the sounds of deep solitudes
seem distilled into crystal swarms.
Furthermore, aII these sounds are linked to movements, they are
like the natural conclusion of gestures with the same attributes. All
this with such a feeling of musical similarity, the mind is at last
obliged to confuse them, attributing the sound qualities of the
orchestra to the artist's hinged gesticulation - and vice versa.
An inhuman, sacred, miraculously revealing impression emanates
from the exquisite beauty of the women's headdress, a series of
radiant tiers made up of arrangements of multi-coloured feathers,
from pearls so lovely their colouring, their variegation seems so
justly to have been revealed, the crests tremble rhythmically,
seeming consciously to answer the trembling bodies. There are
also the other headdresses of a priestly appearance, in tiara form,
topped with egret crests and tufts of stiff flowers in pairs of
contrasting, strangely harmonised colours.
This throbbing ensemble full of rockets, flights, canals, detours
in all the directions of our inner and outer perception, creates
theatre as a sovereign idea such as it has been preserved for us
through the ages, to teach us what it ought never to have stopped
being. And this impression is increased by the fact that this show -
popuIar out there it seems, and profane - is like the daily bread of
these people's artistic feelings.
Aside from this show's stupendous precision, the thing which
seems to surprise and astonish us the most is this revealing aspect
of matter, suddenly seeming to disperse in signs, to teach us the
metaphysical identity of abstract and concrete and to teach it to us
in lasting gestures. For though we are familiar with its realistic
aspect, here it is raised to the nth power and absoltely stylised.
[...]