50 Drawings to Murder Magic

by Antonin Artaud; Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith

• ISBN13: 9781905422661
• ISBN10: 1905422660
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2008-03-18
• Publisher: Seagull Books

Summary

Translated by Donald Nicholson-SmithAntonin Artaud was a poet, theorist, philosopher, essayist, playwright, actor and director, and one of the 20th century's most important theoreticians of drama. His theory of the 'Theatre of Cruelty' has influenced playwrights as diverse as Beckett, Genet, Albee and Gelber.Magic was always a central concept for Artaud, and in nearly all his writing it is given the most positive force, as something capable of healing the rift between words and things, culture and life. But during his nine years of incarceration in mental asylums, magic seemed to lose its illuminating transformative power and to become demonic and persecutory. Artaud entered the realm of spectres and vampires which he believed were sucking the vitality from his mind and body.Artaud later filled twelve little exercise books with an account of his struggles to escape this physical, psychological and artistic hell. The first eleven books are filled with fragments of writing and extraordinary sketches of totemic figures, pierced bodies and enigmatic machines. Two months before his death, he took a twelfth exercise book and wrote a remarkable, incantatory text, 50 Drawings to Murder Magic. It was the last thing he wrote.

Author Biography

Antonin Artaud (1895–1948) spent most of his life in and out of sanatoriums and asylums. He published his most well-known work 1938, The Theatre and its Double. The book is a series of essays, two of which expand on Artaud’s the Theatre of Cruelty, a major defining philosophy in experimental theatre and performing art. He has influenced the works of a number of performers and producers, from Peter Brook to Spalding Gray to Motley Crue and the band Bauhaus.