The Living Theatre and "Violence" from A Director Prepares by Anne Bogart

The work of The Living Theatre has been talked and written about since its inception largely because of its provoking nature unfamiliar to most American audiences (read: rich white folks in New York in the latter half of the twentieth century). For me, it was less provoking than it felt like a stab at being disturbing but without any real core motivation besides to disturb which landed it in a pretty dull state. It definitely executes Artaud's theatre of cruelty but for me, it doesn't excite or disturb me to the point of being engaged and in a heightened state. The only point in which I was disturbed was the ending of lining up shoes and stacking bodies because the image of a row of shoes from "dead" people will always be immediately connected to the Holocaust for me so definitely not a kind of discomfort I welcome.

Anne Bogart's "Violence" also discomforted me in ways that didn't feel very helpful or inspiring because her main thesis here is that in the creation of theater, every limitation or specificity declared onto a piece is a violent act. To my mind, the world is full of violence and acts of aggression that are actually palpable and have lasting harm so her declaring that word for the process she's talking about in this chapter feels reductive and insensitive.

To that end, both pieces definitely ring out to me as attempts for a group of people who haven't experienced much pain or fear or violence to enact it upon the work they do for the sake of feeling something and making the audience/reader feel something. This barebone stab at creating emotion always strikes me as vapid and ignorant because it lays waste to the potential for actual experience which is possible if only a heartfelt and deep goal is sought for.