The Cruelty Tourist and the Emancipated Spectator

In “The Cruelty Tourist and the Emancipated Spectator: Looking for an Essential Theatre,” working from Artaud’s notion of the “Theatre of Cruelty,” Ralf Remshardt maintains that, with the pandemic in mind, “the truly dangerous contagion of the theatre is psychic rather than physical.” He then provides detailed accounts of his experience with what he calls a theatre of excursion and immersion, offering “a rupture, an assault, a calling-into-question of the theatre’s ordinary modes.” Encountering in Peter Brook’s L’Homme Qui a patient who had lost all perception of the left side of the world, or Punchdrunk’s The Masque of the Red Death (2009), which “left its audiences transformed in breath and brain,” he seeks “experiences in the theatre where the form renews itself.”