Taboo

Taboo is a very commonly known word when discussing Antonin Artaud and his theatre. It means that you find a certain subject uncomfortable or awkward to talk about between other people. Antonin Artaud’s theatre shows/productions were very taboo like as the audience found his theatre very uncomfortable to watch. This was not because his theatre was boring or very uninteresting but mainly because the audience was shocked by what he was conveying through his theatre. Through his theatre shows he would normally show horrific scenes of murder, rape, abuse etc. Or he would even give the audience eye contact also he could even place his audience in a position where they couldn’t see the actors performing and another aspect was distance between the actors and audience, either the actors could be really close to the audience or really far away. These type of things contributed to the audience making them uncomfortable and harder to watch.

Within a group we had to come up with a taboo subject and perform it in front of the class. Me personally I found it difficult to come up with a taboo subject as I was quite uncomfortable talking about many things I wouldn’t normally talk about and I would try and shy away from. However, we as a group finally decided that our chosen taboo subject was going to be self-harm. We discussed things that we could include into our piece of theatre related to self-harm and I still found it quite uncomfortable and awkward to talk about it however, that’s what you will get and fell like when talking about a taboo subject. When we rehearsed our taboo piece of theatre we decided to include self-harming aspects such as, scratching your arms, reviling certain parts of your body that isn’t already being reviled, hitting ourselves etc.   

Once we had performed our piece of theatre in front of the class there was a massive contrast within me as of how I thought the performance would go and how the audience would react. Within our performance we used a couple of Antonin Artaud’s features and techniques he would use within his own productions such as, eye contact and making sure that the audience couldn’t see us at the start of the performance. While performing and addressing the audience with eye contact I noticed a lot of sympathy and sadness from the audience which I found quite surprising as I wasn’t expecting a reaction from the audience as such. For some reason I was expecting a more dull reaction from the audience even though our taboo subject was a very serious topic however, I notice that the audience were uncomfortable through a sympathetic way. However, I thought our ideas definitely made it more uncomfortable and harder to watch from an audience’s perspective especially with us actors behind the audience and making painful noises and also coming really close up to different audience members and giving them eye contact.

A couple of performances that really shocked me and made me fill quite uncomfortable as an audience member was the gang rape scene and the sexual abuse scene. As an audience member I just found both of these scenes incredibly shocking which impacted me as an audience member and made it a lot more uncomfortable to watch.