Towards a Formalist Ritualistic Theatre: An Artaudian Reading of Robert Wilson’s Aesthetics

Towards a Formalist Ritualistic Theatre: An Artaudian Reading of Robert Wilson’s Aesthetics

Keren Cohen

              Antonin Artaud is associated with a mythopoetic vision of a ritualistic theatre of dream, magic, and total spectacle, which would replace speech with a visual-kinetic sign language, influencing spectators directly and completely immersing them into the performance. Although his elusive and often contradictory theoretical writings are sufficiently ambiguous to allow for wide interpretations, they have often been interpreted in a selective way, favoring aspects associated with primitivism or violence.[1] As Christopher Innes accurately put it, “Artaud’s name elicits a formula: Primitivism – Ritual – Cruelty – Spectacle.”[2] Artaud’s vision is therefore most commonly identified with the experiments of directors and groups who (knowingly or unknowingly) took up his project and explored the primitivist aspects of his work, such as Jerzy Grotowski or Peter Brook. Within the American context, the publication of the first English translation of The Theatre and Its Double in 1958 made the Frenchman’s theories much more accessible,[3] and his ideas soon gained wide influence among the avant-garde theatre collectives of the 1960s. There Artaud was most particularly associated with Richard Schechner’s Performance Group or Julian Beck and Judith Malina’s Living Theatre, who adopted his ideas and integrated them into their aesthetics. These groups’ aggressive combination of “hot,” physical, ritualistic performance was greatly disliked by Robert Wilson, who said, “I hated the theatre in the 60s. I was never part of that movement. What I was doing did not resemble the Living Theatre, the Open Theatre, or the Performance Group. I went against everything they were doing.”[4] 

              The cool and stylized formalism of Wilson’s work has in fact been traditionally understood as the opposite pole to the experiments of the 1960s American theatre collectives associated with Artaud’s vision. Emerging in New York in the late 1960s, Wilson’s visually-oriented work—which included very little intentional speech or sound—presented an eclectic collection of neo-Surrealist images that unfolded in a continuous process of transformation executed in extreme slow motion. The resulting performance turned away from representation, reverting instead to an interior universe of consciousness. Michael Kirby saw this kind of work as a manifestation of what he termed the “hermetic” avant-garde, which turned inward to a more private and personal world, as well as to other arts and formalism, rather than content. This was contrasted with what he defined as the “antagonistic” avant-garde, associated with the Artaud-inspired work of the American avant-garde theatre collectives of the 1960s, which intentionally attacked traditional tastes, and was characterized by performances oriented toward drama, expressive acting, meaning and content, intended to bring about social change.[5] A similar polarity was highlighted by Elinor Fuchs, who believed that the Artaudian aspiration for presence taken up in the work of Grotowski, Brook, and others, was lost in the cool formality of Wilson’s stage, which broke off the performer’s ritual communion with the spectator.[6] 

              Although Wilson’s cool, reserved aesthetics was very different from what is usually associated with Artaud’s vision, his work nevertheless unknowingly answered the Frenchman’s call for a non-verbal, visual, poetic, ritualistic stage language for communicating mythic material, which would recover “the religious and mystic” in theatre and would “restore all the arts to a central attitude and necessity.”[7] I will shortly examine some of the significant and mostly unrecognized affinities between Wilson’s and Artaud’s work. While in no way exhaustive, the discussion points to some significant parallels, including both men’s aspiration for a theatre of ritual and myth, their employment of visual images, formality, and stylization, and their use of language, music, and sound. The examination will encompass these aspects in both theory and practice. Here, however, lies one significant difference between the two men: there is some irony to the fact that Artaud—who famously wanted to downgrade verbal communication on stage to an incantation and replace speech with a direct, visual sign language[8]—has exerted his wide influence on twentieth- and twenty-first-century theatre mainly through the written words of his theoretical texts, while his practical work has traditionally been dismissed.[9] Wilson, by comparison, never put his artistic views down in writing, let alone formulated any comprehensive theory of performance, and his evolving vision is manifested in the many performances he created.

              While Artaud never realized his ideal theatre, the few practical experiments he conducted nevertheless provide significant clues about his artistic aspirations for the theatre he envisioned. This is particularly true for his staging of his only full-length play, The Cenci, which premiered at the Theatre des Folies-Wagram on May 6, 1935. The production was anticipated as “none other than the conclusion to [the] ‘Manifesto of the Theatre of Cruelty’,” published by Artaud not long before the premiere.[10] In an article printed shortly before the opening night, however, Artaud himself explicitly framed The Cenci as merely a stepping stone towards the realization of his vision, claiming that it “is not yet the Theater of Cruelty but is preparing the way for it.”[11] Nevertheless, following the premiere, critics immediately noted the gap they felt existed between Artaud’s theory and practice, and many believed the play was proof that Artaud was unable to realize his “Theatre of Cruelty” in practical terms. While audience reception seems to have spanned between (some) enthusiasm to (mainly) boredom or amusement,[12] the general impression was summed up by Guermantes, writing for Le Figaro: “Artaud announced it was to be a cruel play. He could not have phrased it better. I did not see that his play was particularly cruel, but the public who came to see it certainly was.”[13] 

              Despite this gap between Artaud’s theory (as it is usually perceived) and his practice, The Cenci still provides the most significant indication for the way in which Artuad envisioned the realization of his Theatre of Cruelty in practice. The play therefore serves as a central example in the following comparative examination of the parallels between Artaud’s vision and practice and Wilson’s aesthetics. The discussion of the American director’s work focuses mainly on performances staged until the mid-1970s. I also establish connections between the practical work of both Artaud and Wilson and the Frenchman’s theory. The valuable insights gained from Innes’s analysis of The Cenci serve as a starting point for the discussion. Approaching the play independently from Artaud’s theory, Innes demonstrates that the Frenchman created a surprisingly calculated and highly formalized performance, which has little in common with “cruelty” or “violence” as they are usually perceived.[14] As the following examination shows, the contrary seems to be true: Artaud’s practical work appears to lead directly to Wilson’s formal dream visions—and most particularly to his early work.[15] 

Myth and Ritual

Wilson’s spectacles until the mid-1970s shared Artaud’s aspirations for a ritualistic performance, which would recover the religious and magical function of theatre, presenting myths in the form of ceremonies overwhelming the audience.[16] This seems to have guided both men’s choice of source material. Based on a true story, The Cenci depicts the occurrences of count Cenci’s family in late sixteenth-century Rome. Artaud’s play drew on Shelley’s and Stendahl’s previous versions, with Shelley’s play serving as the main model for the plot. Most of the dialogue and stage directions, however, were originally written by Artaud, whose version converted Shelley’s emphasis on words and character psychology to stage actions.[17] It appears that the play’s plot was the most violent thing about the production, depicting the story of the tyrannical Cenci, who plots the murder of his two sons and rapes his daughter Beatrice and is then himself murdered by assassins sent by his daughter. The sensationalist source material provided violence, cruelty, and bloodshed in the traditional sense, with issues of incest, rape, and parricide challenging social taboos and society’s basic family structure. In a letter to Andre Gide, Artaud expressed his fear that spectators may react violently to the play, due not to its staging but to its dialogues, which were “of extreme violence,” attacking “notions of Society, order, Justice, Religion, family and country.”[18]

              The themes which appear in Wilson’s work from its very beginning are no less violent. The prologue to Deafman Glance (1971), widely considered to be “the signature piece of Wilson’s theatre,”[19] presents a murder scene, in which a mother performs a ritualistic killing of her two children. In fact, from the death of Freud’s grandson, which opens The Life and Times of Siegmund Freud (1969), to the nuclear explosion, which concludes Einstein on the Beach (1976), the Wilsonian stage is obsessed with death and destruction. The cool surface of beautiful images hides a silent horror.

              The violence presented on Artaud’s and Wilson’s stages is directly related to the fact that the figures who stepped on them were not psychological or historical representations, but unnaturalistic characters of mythic proportions. Reducing speech and psychology to a minimum, Artaud saw the figures of The Cenci as metaphysical “beings,” incarnations of natural forces: “In The Cenci, the father is destroyer, and in this way the theme may be assimilated to the Great Myths.”[20] Just as in the ancient tragedies, Artaud attempted to give speech “not just to men but to beings, beings each of whom is the incarnation of great forces.”[21] Wilson has gone even further in stripping his characters of psychology. Instead of presenting stories, his stage weaves different historical, literary, and cultural sources, but his approach to them always “lingers in myth and dream, the liminal zone between literature and history,” as Bonnie Marranca observes.[22] His early works were often created around immediately recognizable iconic figures, such as Freud, Stalin, or Queen Victoria, who became the work’s associative center, replacing plot. Einstein on the Beach, based around Albert Einstein, was seen by the director not as a historical representation of Einstein but as a poetic work, which centered around what he called “a mythic character”[23] or “a god of our time.”[24] Accordingly, he set about to investigate the popular mythology surrounding Einstein, collecting photos of the scientist and talking to people about him. “We come to the theatre sharing something, knowing something about this mythic God,” he said about Einstein, “just as Racine wrote about the Gods of his time and Euripides wrote about the Gods of his time.” Therefore, Wilson concludes, “we don’t have to tell a story, we can present a piece of poetry.”[25]

              After selecting the performance’s mythic content, Artaud noted that “the next step was to make this Myth tangible.”[26] The form conceived by both men for their mythic material was that of a non-naturalistic, formal theatre ritual, which made wide use of all theatre elements subjugated to their total control. A religious and ceremonial quality characterized both their stages. Artaud described how in The Cenci he attempted to come closer to a theater which would “once again become a religion.”[27] Stefan Brecht, who performed in some of the silent operas, describes how performances “felt to be in the nature of a humorous religious activity,”[28] as participants approached them with “the intense radiation of a magical rite.”[29] 

              Nevertheless, one significant difference existed in the manner in which the rituals of mythic violence were presented on their stages—a difference which may have veiled many of the affinities between their work. On Wilson’s stage, acts of violence such as the horrific murder in Deafman Glance were distanced and performed in complete silence, without any overt expressions of emotionality. Artaud, on the other hand, wanted to draw spectators into his stage by the great intensity, exaggeration and loudness of the acting—a style modeled perhaps on silent film, as Innes argues, where exaggerated acting was necessary for conveying meaning and emotions without words.[30] His performance as Count Cenci seems to have combined a declamatory, monotone delivery of the dialogue with heightened intensity, characterized by “absurd violence, his eyes bewildered and his passion scarcely pretended.”[31] 

              Wilson is typically regarded as a total director, and he aspired for complete and total control over all aspects of production to no lesser degree than Artaud.[32] However, while both Wilson and Artaud perceived performance as an overall composition carefully uniting different arts, they differ with regards to their perception of the relation between the artistic elements. Discussing The Cenci, Artaud highlighted the essential need for using all artistic elements in performance, including the sets, text, gesture, sound, and lighting, believing that each is equally important for creating a work which constituted a whole.[33] Artaud’s aspiration to “restore the central attitude to all arts”[34] manifested in The Cenci in his “attempt to achieve a single, integrated theatrical language,” where “light will constantly be associated with sound in order to produce a total effect.”[35] Wilson’s theatre famously maked similar wide use of all artistic elements, assisted by collaborations with artists such as composer Philip Glass or playwright Heiner Müller. However, the American director’s total vision did not strive for complete harmony between all elements. In fact, Wilson gradually came to think of performance as comprising two separate tracks, the visual and audial, referring to them as the “visual book” and the “audio book.” When the two tracks were combined, Wilson made a conscious effort to ensure they did not repeat or illustrate one another.[36] The Wilsonian totality always incorporated contradiction.

              Both Artaud and Wilson developed aesthetics based on a rejection of Naturalism, creating on their stages a separate universe with its own rules, using dreams as a model. For Artaud, “nothing is less likely to produce an illusion than the illusion of unreal props, flats and painted canvas drops the modem stage offers us.” Instead, he advocates for a stage which is “a whole self-sufficient reality which does not need any other to live.”[37] Wilson expressed similar sentiments when he said, “I think naturalism on stage is a lie, because the stage doesn’t represent a natural situation. I think it is more honest to be artificial.”[38] With language demoted from its primal role in traditional theatre, Artaud—like Wilson after him—focused on poetic visual images, which were to become the center of his new theatre of myth and magic. Eschewing mimesis, Artaud turned to dreams as a model for his poetic visual image: “The public will believe in the theatre’s dreams on condition that it take them for true dreams and not for a servile copy of reality.”[39] The famous dream-like quality of the Wilsonian stage was similarly described by Louis Aragon, who wrote after viewing Deafman Glance, that “it is at the same time, waking life and life with your eyes closed."[40]

Furthermore, the dreamworlds created on Artaud’s stage were meant to free the spectators’ imagination, “to allow the public to liberate within itself the magical liberties of dreams.”[41] This liberation was to be achieved via cruelty, which—as he repeatedly insists—does not mean sadism or bloodshed.[42] This is also highlighted in his comments on his staging of The Cenci: “Let us not be mistaken, Cruelty for me has nothing to do with blood or duty. . . It means doing everything the director can to the sensibilities of actor and spectator.” The intention was to stun and overwhelm the audience, directly involving them in the performance: “I believe in the necessity of using physical means to bring the spectator to submission, to compel him [sic] to participate in the action.”[43] Artaud’s intentions for The Cenci echo his vision of a ritualistic theatre which would possess its audience by the sheer power of its “violent physical images,” and “crush and hypnotize the sensibility of the spectator seized by the theatre as by a whirlwind of higher forces.”[44] Wilson’s visually striking images, which stun the audience’s senses by their sheer power, seem to be a realization of Artaud’s “concrete signs” or “hieroglyphs,” which were to influence spectators directly, without the mediation of rational means.[45] Like Artaud’s stage, the American director’s powerful images—famously called an “extraordinary freedom machine” by Louis Aragon[46]—similarly liberate the spectators’ imagination, and enable them to imagine a different reality.

Formality, Stylization and Precision

The attempt to construct dreamworlds on stage brought both Artaud and Wilson to create performances distinguished by high formality, stylization, and calculated precision. In fact, one of the major inspirations for Artaud’s conception of his ideal theatre—the performance of the Balinese dance company which he famously witnessed at the Paris Colonial Exposition in 1931—was characterized by the exact opposite of what is usually associated with cruelty. Despite Artaud’s many misunderstandings of the performance and its context, his interpretation of it and his foregrounding of its formal elements are significant for understanding his vision. Much of the Frenchman’s praise of the Balinese theatre can be applied with very few alterations both to his staging of The Cenci and to Wilson’s performances: Artaud believed that the Balinese performance’s “spiritual architecture” was “meticulously calculated,” “precise,” “mechanized,” and “mathematical,” and saw it as a theatre of ceremony where everything was predetermined and nothing spontaneously improvised. He emphasized the minute gesture, the “systematic depersonalization” and “the musical qualities of physical movement.” The result was “a sort of spiritual architecture,” created from the evocative power of the entire system.[47] 

              The Cenci (1935) demonstrates how Artaud attempted to achieve a ritualistic, dream-like experience via similar precision and strict organization. The shocking and brutal occurrences of the play were placed in a fixed formal structure, in accordance with Artaud’s demand that any experimentation that took place during rehearsals should “culminate nevertheless in a work written down, fixed in its least details.”[48] The fixed and precise work of art to which Artaud aspired was no longer the written dramatic text, of course, but the performative text—including, among other things, the moves, gestures, and intonations: “The composition, instead of being made in the brain of an author, will be made in nature itself, in real space, and the final result will be as strict and as calculated as that of any written work.”[49] Artaud’s demand that the performance should be “recorded by new means of notation”[50] was realized in the prompt book of The Cenci, in which production notes and blocking diagrams were recorded during rehearsals by Roger Blin,[51] who played one of the mute assassins in the play and served as Artaud’s assistant in the production. As Innes observes, for Artaud, the “scenic rhythms” were the most important aspect of the performance, and the prompt book contains more notes on patterning and tempo than on any other aspect.[52] Artaud himself refers to his staging of The Cenci in terms not unlike his description of Balinese theatre. Relating to “the clock-work precision” which he tried to impose on all scenes, he emphasizes “the precision, the strictness, and the mathematical entrances and exits of actors moving around one another,” which created “a spatial geometry” on stage, ruled by “an inhuman rhythm.”[53] 

              The formalized acting style in The Cenci required actors to move in organized, formal patterns, either in progressions, opposition or unison, forming a calculated symmetry. Mass and individual movements were based on simple geometric forms, such as parallels, triangles, and, mainly, circles. Maurice Dabadie describes Artaud giving almost Wilsonian, spatial directions to his actors, asking them to form a triangle or turn in circles.[54] Artaud explained that The Cenci was based on a kind of gravitational movement, “which moves the plants and human beings.”[55] This “secret gravitation” was manifested in obsessive circular movements of different kinds executed by the actors throughout the performance and described by Artaud in evocative terms (“Orsino traces circles of a bird of prey” or “the veiled guards turn in a circle).”[56] The stylization could also be discerned in the production’s use of slow motion, with stage directions calling for characters to move “exceedingly slowly, like figures on the church clock at Strasbourg.”[57] In performance—as one critic noted—this made some of the slow-moving characters “act like complete robots.”[58] 

              The third scene of the first act depicts a banquet, in which Cenci invites a crowd of noblemen to celebrate what turns out to be the arranged killing of two of his sons. Like much of the production, the scene is based on circular movements, which are indicated in the stage directions, as well as in the blocking diagrams and production notes. Blin’s notes reveal that the scene—depicting what is described in the play as a “violent orgy”[59] —was intended to be performed according to a carefully and densely organized choreography of geometric movements and stylized sounds.[60] The guests dance in circles of varying speeds or move in unison.[61] At other times they “all stand and take one step forward” or “takes one step together, very marked.”[62] The timing of many actions is accurately indicated, with notes such as “all the men freeze for two seconds”.[63] As Innes rightly contends, the scene appears to have been “the opposite to what one normally expects from ‘a scene of orgy’.”[64]

              The stylization and formality of the actors in The Cenci points to the geometric, rhythmic work of Wilson’s performers in productions such as Einstein on the Beach, with their stylized actions executed with the exactitude of ceremony. Wilson—who said he had a “spatial way of thinking”—often treats performers’ bodies as vectors.[65] Anyone who has ever witnessed a Wilson rehearsal is very familiar with his insistence on the same parameters which interested Artaud—tempo and exactitude of movement.[66] Similarly to Artaud, the movement patterns of his production are often constructed around geometric forms, repeated obsessively by figures and objects on stage. “In working on A Letter for Queen Victoria,” for example, the director described how he “used a design of an envelope. . . . The shape of the envelope was traced through all four acts and served as the visual structure of the piece.”[67] On Wilson’s stage, everything is set and determined, down to the smallest gesture or detail. Thomas Derrah, who worked with the director on The CIVILwarS at the American Repertory Theatre, described Wilson’s way of working: “It’s all about precision of movement. He demands meticulous attention to detail, down to the angle of the fingers and the eyes.”[68] Furthermore, the slow motion used by Artaud in The Cenci would later become the trademark of Wilson’s stage, and his performers have often been compared to puppets, moving automata, or gestic sculptures.[69] The stylization, the extreme slow motion, and the careful repetition of concentrated actions without emotional expression—all combined to create a sense of otherworldliness and magic on Wilson’s stage. This gave his performances a “devotional air” and “the form of solemn celebrations,”[70] which Artaud’s use of the same techniques probably also aspired to achieve.

              The geometric movements on Artaud’s stage were not random but symbolic in a way that cannot be found on Wilson’s stage. Artaud’s mythic characters seem to directly and kinetically affect those around them. At times, characters move around others they wish to dominate (“Camillo and Orsino turn and move around Giacomo. . . like the hypnotist of carnivals around a client he wants to petrify”[71]). Other characters—most particularly Cenci, who describes himself as a force of nature[72]—appear to produce a gravitational field, around which other characters revolve. At the banquet scene, for example, Cenci is placed at the center of the mise-en-scene, creating a “whirlwind” of characters tracing circles around him in a trance-like state.[73] While Wilson’s performers appear to be like “lines of force moving through space”[74] similarly to Artaud’s characters, his non-narrative work typically avoids the kind of symbolism found in The Cenci, which associates the “force” projected by characters with specific meanings. Nevertheless, the Wilsonian performers’ presence, with their stylized, expressionless slow motion, again seems to create an effect which is very similar to the one created in Artaud’s play, generating “the impression that the human figures on stage do not act of their own volition and agency,” but are “at the mercy of some mysterious magic.”[75] 

Dreamworlds

Despite significant differences in their visual languages, much of the sense of other-worldliness created on Artaud’s and Wilson’s stages is achieved through their use of sets and lighting. The Cenci’s sets, created by Balthus, were highly praised for their beauty.[76] Artaud believed that the “ultra-real décor is ultra-constructed but, like ruins, it creates an impression of an extraordinary dream.”[77] This impression was undoubtedly created by the Surrealistic-like composition: though each element of the set appears realistic, their combination creates an eerie feeling, with three-dimensional, constructed shapes presented in “distorted perspectives through Escher-like staircases built on opposing diagonals.”[78] Wilson’s sets were usually much more abstract and minimalist than the sets of The Cenci. Yet his work—particularly in its earlier stages—was characterized by similar Surrealist-like juxtapositions of elements which do not belong together, such as Freud’s office and a cave with wild animals in Freud. This evoked frequent comparisons to Lautrémont’s “fortuitous encounter upon a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella.”[79] The logic-less dreamworlds of the Wilsonian stage—where anything could happen without reason or warning—were similar to the ones created in Surrealists films such as Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou (1929). Like Surrealist cinema, Wilson’s early plays used montage techniques to dislodge logical thinking, continuity, and causality, leading Aragon to declare that Deafman Glance was “what we others, who fathered surrealism, what we dreamed it might become after us.”[80] 

              Significantly, both artists also put great importance on lighting. For Artaud, lighting was essential both for creating a total theatre language which unites the different artistic elements, and for engaging the spectators in the performance.[81] According to Artaud, light, combined with sound, was capable of surrounding and immersing the audience, putting it “in the middle of the action.”[82] Light is particularly significant for Wilson’s theatre as well. It is probably the theatre element most identified with the American director’s aesthetics, which gave his “images their distinctive character.”[83] Wilson himself, just like Artaud, perceived light as a unifying element of the stage, capable of transforming its images: “Light is the most important part of theatre. It brings everything together, and everything depends on it. From the beginning I was concerned with light, how it reveals objects, how objects change when light changes…Light is a magic wand.”[84] This transformative quality of light combines in the work of both theatre men with the Surrealist-like sets to transport the stage image to a world of dreams, where—as the Surrealists believe—the mysteries of the unconscious mind could be explored. 

Total Theatre of Immersive Sound

The sound tapestry in both Artaud’s and Wilson’s work comprised different audial elements—including spoken language, music and sound (what Wilson called the “audio book”). In Artaud’s ideal theatre structure, the separation between stage and auditorium—or the domains of art and life—would be abolished, replaced by a single site, without partition or barrier of any kind. There, the spectator would be engulfed by the action and physically affected by it.[85] In his “total spectacle,” “visual and sonorous outbursts” were to be spread “over the entire mass of spectators,” completely immersing them in the performance.[86] While Artaud’s vision of an immersive, total theatre structure incorporated both sight and sound, he appears to have come much closer to achieving his vision in practice in his use of sound.

              In his staging of The Cenci, Artaud used innovative sonic techniques intended to immerse the audience in the performance, as Wilson would do after him. Artaud “was quite explicit about the music and effects that he wanted” for the production.[87] He therefore worked closely with Roger Desormière, who created the music and sound for The Cenci. Together, as Adrian Curtin tells us, they “devised prerecorded sound cues, billed as music (a mixture of short pieces of music, vocalizations and sound effects),” which included cathedral bells, metronomes, recorded voices, wind and thunder effects, and musical instruments such as flutes and tam-tams.[88] As Curtin notes, many of the sounds used in the performance were abstracted in a fashion that prefigures the technique of musique concrète, incorporating recorded, abstract, found sounds.[89] These were layered on top of vocal sounds and words treated sonorically, which were both recorded and delivered by live actors.

              Drawing on Desormière’s wide experience working with microphones and recording techniques, the performance utilized new sound technologies to surround the audience with sound by projecting and amplifying recorded sound via loudspeakers spread in the auditorium. This makes The Cenci “the first time stereophonic sound was used in the theatre,” as Blin notes.[90] Artaud’s original intention was to surround the audience with direct sound emanating from real instruments and objects spread across the auditorium. As this proved impractical, recorded sounds were used instead. Therefore, instead of bringing real cathedral bells to the auditorium, Artaud settled for a recording of a great cathedral bell, which was played via loudspeakers placed at four corners of the auditorium in a way that created “a volume of vibration comparable to that of a cathedral’s great bell,” placing the audience “in the center of a network of sound vibrations.”[91] The spectators who attended The Cenci’s opening night, appear to have been overwhelmed by the loudspeakers: “The audience was surrounded and constantly bombarded by sound,” wrote one critic.[92] Another referred to the production’s “alarming noises,”[93] and yet another wrote that the spectators’ ears were “tortured by deafening music by loudspeakers,” which put them in a state of alert “as if we were hearing the wail of sirens during an evening of ‘air raids’.”[94]

              Even sounds associated with the human figures on stage, such as voices or footsteps, did not always emanate from the stage but were sometimes projected to loudspeakers. Footstep sounds in particular recurred obsessively in the performance. As Barlatier reports, the performers’ actual steps “were echoed by recorded footsteps at full volume,” backed by “the sound, broadcast at different volumes, of a metronome oscillating at various speeds.”[95] The omnipresent sound of the footsteps soon gained the significance of a leitmotif which came to be identified with the threatening forces of Count Cenci and the danger he poses to others. Significantly, his footsteps are sometimes heard when he is not seen on stage, a manifestation of his superhuman powers, which extend beyond his physical presence.  

              Curiously, while Wilson’s aesthetic is identified with the strict separation of stage and auditorium of the proscenium stage, his use of sound in different productions has often spread from the stage into the auditorium, coming close to that of Artaud. The latter’s total soundscape anticipated the total, sophisticated sound environments created by sound artist Hans-Peter Kuhn in his work with Wilson on productions such as Death, Destruction & Detroit (1979). As in the audioscore of The Cenci, Wilson and Kuhn’s experiments combined live and recorded sound, used very similarly. Live sound included the actors’ voices and the sound created by the objects on stage; these were usually amplified and transmitted to various speakers in the theatre. The second and greater part of the audioscore comprised taped material, consisting of prerecorded speech, music and sound effects—many of which were “found sounds” recorded by Kuhn and used as raw materials from which he fashioned a vast and often densely layered tapestry, with sometimes as many as a dozen tapes running simultaneously.[96]

              The immersive sound environment created for DD&D, which would become characteristic of Kuhn’s entire work with Wilson, employed multiple and different loudspeakers grouped around the sides and the back of the auditorium, as well as the ceiling, the proscenium, and backstage, “so you were completely covered by sound,” as Kuhn says.[97] This enabled the artists to flood the audience with auditory information and to create a sound universe which seemed to be controlled by different laws than our reality. Wilson’s non-representational stage lacked much of the symbolic content which lies behind Artaud’s use of the footsteps in his production, for example; nevertheless, Wilson and Kuhn’s formal investigations of sound in itself echoed Artaud’s innovative sound experiments, and produced a complex immersive sound environment, incorporating abstract, recorded, found sounds dispersed throughout the auditorium.

              The use of sound in the last scene of The Cenci, depicting a procession march to Beatrice’s execution, was particularly praised by reviewers. The stage directions call for the procession to be accompanied by a “seven-beat Inca rhythm,”[98] organized into repetitive cyclical rhythmic patterns instead of melody. The “haunting rhythm”[99] of the music was to become increasingly louder as the scene progressed, intended to induce ”a hypnotic effect,” which Artaud believed would be caused by the “repetitious sounds.”[100] Pierre Barlatier tells us that the music for the performance of the scene was created using “anvils, screw nuts, files and other metal objects.”[101] The cyclical rhythmic pattens produced by the metallic objects seem to be reminiscent of the repetitive rhythmic cycles produced by the metallic percussion instruments dominating the gamelan music that accompanied the Balinese dance theatre that Artaud witnessed at the Paris Colonial Exhibition.

              Although music did not play a major role in Wilson’s early performances, its introduction as a significant element into his theatre with Einstein on the Beach in 1976 further exposes his work’s affinities to Artaud. In Einstein, image and sound combine to overwhelm the audience, as in Artaud’s vision. Based on the structure of the Indian Tala, Philip Glass’s music for the opera consciously reversed the priorities of Western music, which is traditionally structured around harmonic progressions and melody. Einstein’s music was instead organized around complex rhythmic structures, similar to the Tala’s cyclical rhythmic organization.[102] Wilson’s mesmerizing images were therefore complemented by Glass’s trance inducing repetitive, cyclical rhythmic structures, creating a synergic effect and inducing a hypnotic state in spectators. In this respect, Glass’s music reminds us both of the music for The Cenci and of the repetitive rhythmic cycles of Balinese gamelan music—despite the fact that the audioscores composed for The Cenci and Einstein sounded very different (and both also differed significantly from the sound of gamelan music). Not surprisingly, critics spoke of the hypnotic, other-worldly quality of Einstein’s music and stage,[103] declaring it to be “almost religiously moving.”[104] 

              Language in The Cenci was largely treated as sound, in accordance with Artaud’s aspiration for a non-literary theatre, which would affect the audience without the mediation of verbal language. The dialogue was therefore organized musically and rhythmically and delivered in a formalized manner. Many times, the sonoric treatment of words and vocal sounds carried symbolic meaning. The stage directions for the scene depicting the attempted assassination of Cenci (III, ii) detail how “merged with the wind, we hear voices repeating the name ‘Cenci’;” the directions go on to describe the use of sound in visual terms, stating that the count’s name is heard “first on a high, drawn out tone, then like a pendulum. . . At times the names intermingle like countless flocks of birds, gathering in the sky. Then amplified voices heard nearby, like flights swooping past.”[105] A reviewer’s description of the musical effect of this scene in performance seems to depict a twentieth-century, technologically-supported, Baroque-like musical embellishment on the name Cenci: over the sounds of a raging tempest and loud haunted melodic tones, one could hear “recorded voices that shouted and whispered Cenci’s name in a contrapuntal composition; the words crossed one another and were at first separated in time but came closer, rising in a crescendo that was immediately silenced.”[106] Non-verbal vocal sounds were also treated musically to symbolic effect. In the banquet scene, for example, an evocative vocal montage-like pattern must have created an uneasy effect, which complemented the eeriness of the sets, as “all of a sudden, a cry rends the air, a jarring laugh rises to a high pitch, a woman's voice wails.”[107] Blin reveals that Artaud wanted each of the princes in the scene “to resemble an animal,” and therefore asked “them to play animals and make certain throaty noises.”[108] The stylized sounds combined with the scene’s calculated geometric arrangement to symbolically expose the bestial nature of the characters, which lies beneath the controlled surface. The result was a complex musical-kinetic tapestry, which also characterized Wilson’s work.

              Wilson’s early performances, with their near-elimination of language, seem to have taken Artaud’s concept of a non-literary theatre to the extreme. Artaud himself, however, did not envision a silent stage: not only in practice, but also in his theory he famously advocated the musical use of language as incantation.[109] This characterized Wilson’s work with language from the first production in which language was incorporated into his theatre as a significant element, A Letter for Queen Victoria (1974). What fascinated the director about the work of autistic youth Christopher Knowles, who wrote many of Victoria’s texts, was the musical sense of construction and the energy and rhythms of his texts, where “words were all carefully patterned.”[110] Victora’s dialogue was an associative aural collage, including obsessive repetitions and a montage of partial sentences and found language, characterized by disjunction and discontinuity. This created an alogical, interrupted dialogue, in which language was separated from its semantic meaning in favor of its sonoric, formal qualities.[111] Like Artaud, Wilson also often thinks of the texts of his performances in structural, formal, visual, and sonoric terms, describing the text of Death, Destruction & Detroit, for example, as “an architectural arrangement of musical verbal elements.”[112]

              The formal treatment of language continued even as dramatic texts entered the director’s work in the mid-1980s. In Wilson’s staging of Heiner Müller’s Hamletmaschine (1986), one of his first stagings of dramatic texts, the actors used diverse techniques of vocal production, from screaming to whispering, from stuttering to over-melodic speech, sometimes imitating animal sounds or sirens. Wilson even went as far as claiming that “What interests me about Heiner’s writing. . . is how it sounds."[113] Although the semantic meaning was almost always secondary to the sonoric effect, sometimes the musical treatment of words from the play’s dialogue illustrated their meaning. When the text depicts a character torn to pieces by wolves, for example, the words become almost an onomatopoeia, as the sentence is increasingly torn to pieces by the speakers in each of the five times it appears. Another example is the word “blood,” which was expressed as a rising siren.[114] The American director’s sonoric treatment of language therefore sometimes carried symbolic meaning, which brought his work closer to that of Artaud’s treatment of the dramatic text.

Conclusion

The comparative examination of Artaud’s and Wilson’s work reveals some significant parallels, alongside some important differences. It seems that Wilson unknowingly took up some of the innovative aspects of Artaud’s theoretical and practical work and continued to perfect many of the techniques employed by the Frenchman. Both artists staged violent themes of death and catastrophe within a precisely-set, stylized, and formalist performative language. Both aspired for a total theatre of ritual and myth, which makes wide use of all artistic elements to create a poetic dreamworld on stage. Constructed as a carefully planned audio-visual tapestry, these dreamworlds drew the spectators into the performance by means of physical and concrete sounds and images.

              The analysis presented here of course in no way claims that Wilson’s work continued Artaud’s project in all respects: the coolness of the Wilsonian stage contrasts sharply with the intensity of Artaud’s vision, for example. Neither does this examination suggest that Wilson’s theatre is the only possible way to take up and evolve Artaud’s vision; the projects of directors such as Brook or Grotowski clearly demonstrate that this is not the case. Moreover, it is of course impossible to draw any general conclusions about Artaud’s practical work from a single production, the only attempt he made to realize his Theatre of Cruelty. Nevertheless, this discussion demonstrates that Artaud’s vision and practical work at the very least point to Wilson’s work as one possible direction in which the Frenchman’s project can be taken up. This can potentially enrich our understanding of Artaud’s practical work and theory, beyond the surface level of what is usually associated with a ritualistic spectacle of cruelty.

              The discussion can also help to better contextualize Wilson’s aesthetics with regards to both the first wave of the European avant-garde and the American avant-garde of the second half of the twentieth century, from which his work sprang. It also exposes the surprising political potential of Wilson’s aesthetics, often considered apolitical. As we saw, in The Cenci, the creation of a stage world which does not imitate daily reality but which establishes a separate and distinct reality was used by Artaud to attack the structural principles of society, such as order, justice, religion, and family. This suggests that Wilson’s stage—with its similarly distinguished dreamworld—could also enable its spectators to imagine an alternative world, something which in itself has political implications.