Rencontre en surréalisme : spectacle performance d'après « Le Pèse-Nerfs » d'Antonin Artaud

L’APRES (Association pour la Recherche et l’Étude du Surréalisme) presents a show-performance by Charles Gonzalès, director and playwright, based on “Le Pèse-Nerfs”, a collection of poems by Antonin Artaud published in 1925, with musical accompaniment by Patrick Hamel on synthesiser and saxophone.

What’s on: Published in 1925, “Le Pèse-Nerfs” by Antonin Artaud is one of the foundational texts of a radical body of work that upended twentieth-century literature.

Moving between poetic fragments, meditations on thought and heartbreaking letters, this book lets us hear a voice at war with itself. Artaud explores the intimate experience of a mind gripped by anguish, rupture and the impossibility of fully grasping thought.

Words become both tools and obstacles: they attempt to render a fragmented consciousness, a constant struggle between language, the body and the mind. Through a dazzling, at times violent style, Artaud takes aim at the literary conventions and intellectual certainties of his era.

This incandescent text reveals an absolute quest: to recover, at the heart of inner chaos, a point of truth where thought and life might finally meet. “Le Pèse-Nerfs” thus remains a singular testimony to creation, lucidity and the fragility of the human mind.

Babelio Find out more Antonin Artaud (extract from Wikipedia) Born on 4 September 1896 in Marseille and died on 4 March 1948 in Ivry-sur-Seine, Antonin Artaud was a French artist and intellectual: a writer, theorist of theatre, actor, essayist, draughtsman and poet.

Poetry, staging, drugs, pilgrimages, drawing and radio were each a tool in his hands, a means of developing his art. Throughout his life, Antonin Artaud fought physical pain with medication and drugs. This constant presence of pain affected both his relationships and his work.

He also underwent a series of electroshock treatments during successive confinements, and he spent the last years of his life in psychiatric hospitals, notably the one in Rodez.

While his mental imbalances made his human relationships difficult, they also fuelled his creative work.