Surrealist Encounters: Performance based on "The Nerve Meter" by Antonin Artaud

The Program

Published in 1925, "The Nerve Meter" ("Le Pèse-Nerfs") by Antonin Artaud is one of the founding texts of a radical body of work that shook 20th-century literature.

Combining poetic fragments, meditations on thought, and heart-wrenching letters, this book gives voice to a mind at war with itself. Artaud explores the intimate experience of a spirit traversed by anguish, rupture, and the impossibility of fully grasping thought. Words become both tools and obstacles: they attempt to translate a fragmented consciousness, a permanent battle between language, body, and spirit. Through a dazzling, sometimes violent writing style, Artaud attacks the literary conventions and intellectual certainties of his time.

This incandescent text reveals an absolute quest: to find, at the heart of inner chaos, a point of truth where thought and life could finally meet. "The Nerve Meter" thus remains a unique testimony to creation, lucidity, and the fragility of the human mind.

Babelio

More Information

Antonin Artaud (excerpt from Wikipedia)

Born September 4, 1896, in Marseille and died March 4, 1948, in Ivry-sur-Seine, Antonin Artaud was a French artist and intellectual, writer, theater theorist, actor, essayist, illustrator, and poet.

Poetry, directing, drugs, pilgrimages, drawing, and radio—each of these activities served as a tool in his hands, a means to develop his art.

Throughout his life, Antonin Artaud struggled against physical pain with medication and drugs. This omnipresence of pain influenced his relationships and his creative work. He also underwent series of electroshock treatments during successive interments and spent the final years of his life in psychiatric hospitals, notably in Rodez. While his mental imbalances made his human relationships difficult, they also contributed to fueling his creative output. On one hand, there are the "mad texts of Rodez and the end of his life," and on the other, according to Évelyne Grossmann, the "dazzling texts of his beginnings."

Inventor of the concept of the "theater of cruelty" in The Theater and Its Double, Antonin Artaud attempted to radically transform literature and, above all, theater. While he did not succeed, he certainly influenced generations after May 68, particularly American theater, and the Situationists of the late 1960s who claimed his revolutionary spirit. He also influenced the anarchist group Living Theatre, which cites him in their play The Brig, where they put Antonin Artaud's theories into practice.

Charles Gonzalès is an actor, director, playwright, and essayist. He trained at the Conservatoire National Supérieur d'Art Dramatique in Paris, in the classes of Pierre Debauche and Antoine Vitez. He has performed under the direction of Jean-Louis Barrault, Roger Planchon, Jorge Lavelli, Gérard Gélas, Lannis Lordanidis, Hans Peter Cloos, Jacques Kraemer, Michel Fagadau, Jean-Louis Martinelli, and others. He wrote, directed, and performed a trilogy: Camille Claudel, Thérèse of Avila, and Sarah Kane.

Patrick Hamel is an actor for theater, cinema, and television. He is also a musician and saxophonist in the group Urban Sax. He composes and sings texts by Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Nerval, and Apollinaire. He accompanies himself on piano, guitar, and transverse flute. His show "Journey into Poetry" was awarded the "Printemps des poètes" label in 2021.

Organization

Françoise Py is the president of the association L'APRES. A poet and writer, she was a lecturer in Art History and Theory at the University of Paris 8, in the Plastic Arts department. She has written numerous articles on surrealist painters, sculptors, and writers, notably in the digital journal Mélusine. She organizes the Surrealist Encounters at the Halle Saint Pierre, as part of L'APRES.

https://www.melusine-surrealisme.fr/wp/melusine-numerique
https://www.hallesaintpierre.org/rencontres-en-surrealisme/