Primrose Road

As I'm catching up on my reading for the annotated bibliography that's due in less than three weeks:

1) For lack of a better expression, Artaud gets wackier every time I read him.

2) Grotowski was right in pointing out that Artaud's theatre of cruelty was more of a manifesto than a method.

3) And Artaud wasn't much of an upstanding philosopher, either. His commentary on the Balinese theatre derives from his encounter with a Balinese theatre "display" of sorts at the Paris Exposition in the 1930s. Fascinating how he tries to pass colonialist display off as ritual.

4) His plague-theatre analogy is almost ... Cartesian? ... in its insistence that what makes theatre *interesting* is how it "attacks" only those organs and body parts associated with consciousness.

That's enough theory for today. I'll post my review of The Wooster Group's Hamlet later this weekend. For now, enjoy this blurry cellphone photo of Cooper Union kids spinning the Astor Place cube:



Despite the fact that the East Village really isn't the East Village anymore, some things never change.