These effects can be summarized as follows:ġ) Theater turns visuality into an autonomous medium. Theater was one of the phenomena resulting from the invention of the phonetic alphabet, and as such it functioned as an amplifier of the cognitive, emotional and sensory effects of alphabetization, ensuring that all members of Athenian society, regardless of whether they were literate or illiterate, would acquire and internalize these effects (Kerckhove 1981, 23).
What Friedrich Nietzsche’s late-romantic view calls “the spirit of music,” (responsible for the “birth of tragedy”), can be traced back to the alphabetization in ancient Greece. In order to understand the modern conception of theater, it is helpful to recall some of the media-theoretical basics of ancient Greek theater. Throughout the modern theater movement – including Strindberg, Mejerhol’d, Brecht and, of course, Artaud – we find a general tendency to subvert, or even eliminate, constitutional elements of theater. A practical perspective, such as that of Bakhtin and Artaud, may help to better understand forms of performing arts that are highly body-orientated, such as those of late Soviet and Post-soviet arts and culture. A theoretical perspective allows us to study the basic mechanics of visuality and verbalization, as well as the language and the body in theatrical representation. While Bakhtin develops the concept of the “grotesque” body, Artaud requires the artists “to traumatize their bodies methodologically.”Ī discussion of Bakhtin’s and Artaud’s re-conception of theatrical representation requires both a theoretical and a practical perspective. Yet both sides show a particular interest in the dialectics of the body as a basic medium of aesthetic and ethic innovation.
The aim of Artaud’s critique, on the other hand, is aimed at the Western tradition of theater itself, as it doubts its textual and literal foundation. However, Bakhtin and Artaud approach the issue of textual representation from opposite sides since Bakhtin favors the spoken word, his critique is directed against the abstract literacy of books, thus making a reference to the theatrical. Bakhtin’s struggle against the abstraction of literature creates a strong structural analogy to Antonin Artaud’s conception of theater, which has also been inspired by the vision of transcending textual-based theater Artaud’s “theater of cruelty” aims to lead the individual back to theater’s archaic roots of self-constitution.