This does not necessarily mean a theatre that drops all conventions of a normative New York City theatre experience. 1 Instead, it refers to an event that takes place in a performative space shared by actors and audience, where truth can emerge by using the assets of its medium as theatre.

For my purposes in this article, “theatricality of the medium” is used to describe theatre that does not aspire to be a sequestered leisure activity detached from “real” life, where an illusion of reality is enacted behind an invisible fourth wall. Theatricality, whether as a descriptor in the theatre world or in the theatrum mundi, is a slippery term that “has achieved an extraordinary range of meanings, making it everything from an act to an attitude, a style to a semiotic system, a medium to a message” ( Davis and Postlewait 2003:1). New playwriting and directing trends in and around the New York City theatre scene-on, off, and off-off Broadway-are increasingly exploring the theatricality of the medium of theatre itself, an exploration that can be traced back to the rise of modernism during the first half of the twentieth century. Contemporary theatre’s continuously emerging engagement with theatricality since the 1960s is mapped back to Artaud’s reactions to his chance encounter with the Balinese gamelan in 1931. Artaud’s understandings (and misunderstandings) of what he witnessed inspired his ongoing quest to recuperate the form and purpose of theatre in order to save it from what he considered its quotidian fate as mere illusion.

One such person was the actor, playwright, poet, and drama theorist Antonin Artaud (1896‒1948), who attended a performance of the Balinese gamelan at the Paris International Colonial Exposition in 1931. Before the advent of global travel, many people first encountered Indonesian music and dance at a world’s fair or colonial exposition.

Artaud the theatre and its double pdf