on to say that Manifeste du théâtre de la cruauté (1932; Manifesto of the Theatre of Cruelty) and Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double) both called for "communion between actor and audience in a magic exorcism; gestures, sounds, unusual scenery, and lighting combine to form a language, superior to words, that can be used to subvert thought and logic and to shock the spectator into seeing the baseness of his world." Artaud warned against the dangers of psychology in theater and strove to create a theater in which the mise-en-scène, everything present in the staging of a production, could be understood as a codified stage language, with minimal emphasis on spoken language. Defining Artaud's "theatre" and "cruelty" In his writings on the Theatre of Cruelty, Artaud notes that both "theatre" and "cruelty" are separate from their colloquial meanings. For Artaud, theatre does not merely refer to a staged performance before a passive audience. The theatre is a practice, which "wakes us up. Nerves and heart," and through which we experience "immediate violent action" that "inspires us with the fiery magnetism of its images and acts upon us like a spiritual therapeutics whose touch can never be forgotten." Similarly, cruelty does not refer to an act of emotional or physical violence. According to scholar Nathan Gorelick, Cruelty is, more profoundly, the unrelenting agitation of a life that has become unnecessary, lazy, or removed from a compelling force. The Theatre of Cruelty gives expression to everything that is ‘crime, love, war, or madness' in order to ‘unforgettably root within us the ideas of perpetual conflict, a spasm in which life is continually lacerated, in which everything in creation rises up and asserts itself against our appointed rank.For Artaud, cruelty is not exclusively sadism or causing pain, but just as often a violent, physical determination to shatter a false reality. He believed that text had been a tyrant over meaning, and advocated, instead, for a theatre made up of a unique language, halfway between thought and gesture. Artaud described the spiritual in physical terms, and believed that all theatre is physical expression in space.Evidently, Artaud's various uses of the term cruelty must be examined to fully understand his ideas. Lee Jamieson has identified four ways in which Artaud used the term cruelty. First, it is employed metaphorically to describe the essence of human existence.Artaud's second use of the