Theatre Of Cruelty

European theatre during the last century witnessed several innovations in theatrics and dramaturgy. Moving away from the canons of illusionary theatre of Aristotle, these theatres experimented with the techniques used ranging from dialogue and music to the participation of the audience in plays. One of the major innovation was that the change of audience from the role of mere spectators to that of the enactors. Theatre of Cruelty propounded by the French playwright Antonin Artaud was a major experimental theatre of this kind. This paper concentrates more on the theatrical techniques used by Artaud and not on the dramatic literature. Experiencing and experimenting Artaudian theatre reveals that it has several parallels in the traditional theatre

Focussing more on the style, and incorporating the audience more into the dramatic art, these experimental theatrical forms revolutionized the western canons of drama. This paper entitled Deconstructing Character and Violence: Parallels in Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and Ritual theatre of Indian tradition attempts to make a preliminary investigation of the similarities and parallelisms between the theory and practice of a major experimental theatre of the west of the recent times –the theatre of cruelty propounded by French playwright Antonin Artaud and that of the traditional Indian theatre, particularly the ritual theatre of India with an ancient lineage. Rather than focusing upon the dramatic literature or comparing the dramatic literature of east and west, the attempt is to focus upon the presentation of these theatres in front of the spectators and the techniques used, and the problems related to the presentation of

It would also include the elements of folk and tribal theatres. But these theatres have diverse features of their own and are much secular in their spirit. Ritual theatre has an element of religion embedded within it, for it being a sacred one it exists only across the premises of worship. Ritual theatre still preserved in its root form by different communities in many parts of India helps to keep alive the link between theatre and Yajna or sacrifice. This has been made clear by Christopher Byrski in his Concept of Ancient Indian Theatre that,

“The fact that Yajna is an organized movement makes out of it an archetypal action, the actors of which are the gods. The first action, which signifies the emergence of order from chaos and of dynamic activity out of the womb of stillness or rest dressed up in the intricacies of an elaborate ritual and endlessly repeated by both gods and men became not only a model sacrifice but became also a pattern for everything that