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I will try to elaborate on what I mean in a subsequent post; let me just say that the Jónsi set seemed to realize Antonin Artaud’s theater of cruelty. “Not decor,” Artaud writes in the First Manifesto, but rather “hieroglyphic characters, ritual costume, thirty foot effigies of King Lear’s beard in the storm, musical instruments as tall as men, objects of unknown form and purpose” will produce a theater in which the audience does not watch a drama on stage but rather is “encircled and furrowed by” performance. The language of manifesto, no doubt; but Artaud’s aspiration that theater become at once participatory and conceptual has of course intrigued directors, actors and playwrights since the 1930s.
This from Allison Carruth, writing about Jónsi (from Sigur Ros): ow.ly/1zBCF
Pretty big call! (but I’m going to see Jónsi in May to check it out).