ABSTRACT
The theoretical announcement of a postmodern theater was given by Antonin Artaud in his seminal work, The Theater and Its Double, published in France in the 1930s. Artaud called for an end to all representation in the theater, the replacement of a dead theater of ‘authors’ and ‘the word’ (“no more masterpieces”) with a sacred theater of gesture, the liberation of the actor enslaved to the text and therefore divided from himself, into a pure carnal presence “signaling through the flames,” 1 and the replacement of a passive theater of speculation with a sacred festive theater of participation. The radical interrogation of traditional theatrical practice implied in his ‘theater of cruelty’ and his recommendations for a new ‘impossible’ sacred theater have set the challenge to which all postmodern theater has responded, either by trying to overcome what in traditional representative theater was the subject of his criticism or by trying to institute his ‘impossible’ sacred theater. “If the public does not frequent our literary masterpieces it is because those masterpieces are literary, that is to say, fixed, and fixed in forms that no longer respond to the needs of the time.” 2
