Artaud's ritual theater and the Shamanic Healing

Abstract

This work has the main goal of discussing the vision of the Theatre of Cruelty proposed by the poet Antonin Artaud as a healing tool. As pointed out by de Junito de Souza Brandão, the tragedy was born from the cult of the god Dionysus, and the rites's participants got drunk and fell fainted after intense festivity. In this state, they believed to step out of themselves through the process of ékstasis, ecstasy. The same journey takes place in shamanic healing through a process cruel healing, in which the shaman, in an ecstatic state, is touched by death and thus acquires a healing power. Artaud promotes a rapprochement between theatrical action and ritual, rescuing the idea of theater as a magical and real activity, as a healing practice, a cleansing, through a grueling initiation process, in which the division between body and mind can finally be abolished