Classical Plus - Outside of Your Senses

Metaphysics of the Theatre of Cruelty

After the radiant reaction to our last Boundless B, we somehow continue — without even realizing it — with two more B’s: Bartók and Bach. Apparently, escaping the alphabet of the subconscious takes longer than planned. (At least this time, we can blame it not only on Grace Park, recently submitted for Grammy consideration, but also on Antonin Artaud — who insists on turning every concert into an existential earthquake.)

But more seriously — let’s try to understand something that, according to Artaud, can only be understood through shock therapy. Which is to say: impossible, unless you live through it. (Don’t worry — we’ll keep the voltage artistic.)

Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty is not a genre, not a school, but an experience — an experience that sprinkles a little fairy dust of philosophy and then jolts you awake. Here, words stop pretending to be the center of the world. They step aside, allowing breath, gesture, the flash of light, and the thundering beat of sound to speak instead. This theatre doesn’t soothe — it shakes. It doesn’t explain — it exposes. It makes the body react before the mind has a chance to interfere. Artaud didn’t want you to “understand”; he wanted you to tremble.

Artaud himself lived as a martyr of thought: his body “without skin,” like Kafka, Bartók, or Munch — raw, exposed to the world’s every blow. For him, ideas weren’t abstractions; they were wounds. Theatre was his way of showing them. And cruelty, for him, meant stripping the audience of comfort — pushing them beyond psychology, beyond polite dialogue, into the naked immediacy of being alive, right now.

In our performance, we weave together the story and philosophy of Artaud with music that vibrates in his spirit: Bartók’s ugly-yet-beautiful sonata for violin and piano — a work of nerves, naked skin, electric shocks, and dangerous silences — followed by Bach, who restores divine order after the storm. If Bach offers harmony and Bartók raw nerve, Artaud gives us the jolt in between — that luminous shock of realizing that thought, sound, and flesh are, in fact, one and the same trembling thing.

Perhaps that’s what the Metaphysics of Cruelty really is: not the theatre of pain, but the theatre of awakening — where meaning is born, burns, and disappears, leaving us blinking, alive.

Artistically yours,
Leon