JAN DEEN PHOTOGRAPHY

Artaud at the Theatre Sarah-Bernhardt in Paris. Artaud, who had been a film actor, a
director and a playwright was just released from nine years of tragic confinement in an
asylum for the insane. Two years later he died, leaving behind him a body of important
criticism, demonstrating his legacy of uncompromising search for magic and truth in a
monumental effort to bring life into the theatre. Some credit Artaud with being a founder
of post modern theatre - for me, his insights are a guide to what a theatrical
vision of photography aspires.

Nietzsche said that nobody can get more out of things than he already knows. For

what one lacks access to from experience one will have “no ear.” I spent a good deal of my life learning about my subjects and involved in the processes of photography of my era, finding particular joy printing black and white in the darkroom.. I formally studied classical ballet and method acting after leaving university studies in art history and philosophy. I apprenticed with several successful commercial photographers in automotive advertising, architectural and product photography but chose a journalist’s path toward “the Performative Moment” in an atmosphere of stages with working dancers, directors and actors: subjects I most admired. I believe Artaud would have blessed my peculiar passion–this photographic quest for a “certain poetry in space which itself is taken for sorcery.”

ARTAUD FROM THE THEATER AND ITS DOUBLE

“It would be meaningless to say that the New Theatre includes music, dance, pantomime, or mimicry.  Obviously it uses movement, harmonies, rhythms, but only to the point that they can concur in a sort of central expression without advantage for any one particular art.  This does not at all mean that it does not use ordinary actions, ordinary passions, but like a springboard uses them in the same way that humor as destruction can serve to reconcile the corrosive nature of laughter to the habits of reason.

But by an altogether oriental means of expression, this objective and concrete language of the theater can fascinate and ensnare the organs. It flows into the sensibility.  Abandoning Occidental usages of speech, it turns words into incantations.  It extends the voice. It utilizes the vibrations and qualities of the voice.  It wildly tramples rythms underfoot, It pile-drives sounds. It seeks to exalt, to benumb, to charm, to arrest the sensibility.  It liberates a new lyricism of gesture which, by its precipitation or its amplitude in the air, ends by surpassing the lyricism of words.  It ultimately breaks away from the intellectual subjugation of the language, by converying the sense of a new and deeper intellectuality which hides itself beneathe the gestures and signs, raised to the dignity of particular exorcisms.

For all this magnetism, all this poetry, and all these direct means of spellbinding would be nothing if they were not used to put the spirit physically on the track of something else, if the true theatre could not give us the sense of a creation of which we possess only one face, but which is completed on other levels.”

This site is  dedicated to refining and defining a collection of Jan Deen images toward book form, many previously published in print, celebrating unique and powerful live performances created by artists working in the environment of 20th century fin de mille Hollywood.  The era consists of a unique history of what was known as The Dance Explosion, Equity Waiver Theatre, and the birth of Performance Art.

All Photos Copyright Jan Deen Phototheatre 1971–2001.  All rights reserved.

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