REVEALING ARTAUDIAN MIDDLE UTTERANCES WITH THE DRAMATIC ‘CHORUS’ OF THE ‘EAST’ AND ‘WEST'

Agency and/or Creator

HAZEL TAHKOUH Ē ANTARAMIAN HOFMAN, IDSVA

Bureau/Division/Agency

Library

Files

Document Type

Text

Broad Creation Date

2025

Language

English

Location

Portland

Abstract

This project studies ‘middle utterances’ in the Artaudian oeuvre. When Artaud’s poetics are engaged within the realms of song-and-dance cultures, this collective body of sound and gesture allows us to re-situate Artaud’s ‘voice’ within contemporized spaces of ritual-drama of the ancient Greek dramatic chorus and the contemporized medieval Japanese dramatic dance of Butō. The Artaudian ‘voice’ is positioned in terms of the ‘face/mask’ as prosópon, ‘self/voice’ as personae, and ‘body/space’ as soma, and within the ‘instruments of cruelty’ structured as tragodia, thrénos, and katharsis. Within a mode of Glissant’s ‘poetics of Relations’, Artaud’s embodied oeuvre as écho-monde opens to another écho-monde, that of the medieval/contemporary Japan ‘East’ dance performance and the ancient Greco ‘West’ chorus as expressions of corporeal image, sound, and movement toward the human condition, most heightened in the ancient tragedies. Created as a collage of poetic relations, this project illustrates the intertwined spaces and synechic edges of these song-and-dance cultures to informs our understanding of subject-affectedness in Artaudian poetics when it is placed with shared notions of imagery, magic, intensity, void, language, and transformative forces of bodies. The trajectory of song and dance cultures of tragedies transmit most profoundly subject-affected declarations as ‘I suffer’ or ‘I dance,’ rendering the most intense of transformative processes. It is the middle voice that delivers the utterance of suffering as the language of transformation. Guided by the writings of Jean Baudrillard, Stephen Barber, and Sondra Fraleigh, the contemporary Japanese vii dance of Butō advances Artaud’s ‘voice’ toward Eastern thought and extends his oeuvre into realms where in-betweens are proffered as a grammatical middle utterance in prose, correspondence, poetry, and the visual language of his (portrait) drawings. It is middle utterance that is best used to describe the enigmatic interval or gaps prevalent in Artaud’s correspondence and prose when we have an interface with the Eastern philosophical concept of ‘negative space’ known as ma in Japanese culture. Furthermore, by allowing affected ‘sensing’ or phenomenological perception as we find in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, this project explores sensory connections between ‘bodies’ as utterance. What we call ‘middle utterance’ lends to the perceiving body as subject-affected events within modes of performance, and by extension, to transformative healing. Moreover, it is with the Artaudian construct of the ‘body without organs,’ reshaped as the BwO concept in Deleuze and Guattari where we find the philosophical praxis of a transformative ‘healing’ experience as middle utterance.

Disciplines

Aesthetics | Art Practice | Dance | Philosophy

Publisher

Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts

City

Portland ME

Recommended Citation

HOFMAN, HAZEL TAHKOUH Ē ANTARAMIAN, "REVEALING ARTAUDIAN MIDDLE UTTERANCES WITH THE DRAMATIC ‘CHORUS’ OF THE ‘EAST’ AND ‘WEST'" (2025). Academic Research and Dissertations. 71.
https://digitalmaine.com/academic/71