Ludics in Surrealist Theatre and Beyond by Rapti Vassiliki

Author:Rapti, Vassiliki.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Ltd.
Published: 2013-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

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STAGING CHILD’S PLAY IN ROGER VITRAC’S VICTOR OR CHILDREN IN POWER: BETWEEN PAIDIA AND LUDUS1

The sight of the masked figure … carries us back to the world of the savage, the child and the poet, which is the world of play (Huizinga 26).

And this child is the child not of Christ but of Heraclitus. It is the innocent power as eternity, beginning its game of creation and destruction each time anew, without remorse, in blissful self-forgetfulness (Nietzsche, quoted in Sutton Smith 113).

Rationalistic thought “seems to have dominated most of Western thinking about play,” both in terms of play itself being seen as rationally guided, and in terms of using a rationalist approach to interpreting play (Sutton Smith 81). However, many great thinkers, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, saw children’s play “as a kind of irrational power” (ibid. 112). Likewise, Huizinga, in this chapter’s opening quotation, overtly equates the world of play in general with the world of the primitive, the child, and the poet, hinting at their common lack of reason. André Breton also aligned himself with this approach to play, seeing it as irrational and ritualistic,2 heralding play’s basic indeterminism, chaos, irrationality or even absurdity:

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