Welcome to Theatre of Cruelty.

Theatre of Cruelty is a methodology of live theatrical performance developed by Antonin Artaud. Too radical for the surrealist movement, and was excommunicated from the Paris subculture after a short period, mostly for being too annoying. In social exile, with his other unpopular friends, he developed a kind of live performance that sought to generate artistic experiences so aggressively disruptive to the viewer that they were forced to reckon with the most suppressed, denied, and exiled parts of themselves. I am a huge fan.

My name is Tara.

I’m an urban Indigenous (Mi’kmaq, band member at Millbrook First Nation), and worker in North America’s last great Bohemian city. I trained as a political philosopher and poet. My memoir was a finalist for the largest nonfiction award in Canada. I write this newsletter (about!) once a month. For more of my stuff, you can find me in print and online, follow me on instagram, or lend totally vital support as a paid subscriber to this newsletter — for which you’ll get access to the full archive of 3+ years of Theatre of Cruelty.

Feel free to reach out to ask about my rates if you want to collaborate — I have experience as a substantive editor, sensitivity reader and ghostwriter.

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You will get every issue of Theatre of Cruelty sent to your email inbox. Every article is free to share and read for two weeks before it gets moved into the paid archive.

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I am a one-girl art-making machine and it’s a big, bad, expensive world out there. For my fourteenth birthday, I got a job, and I’ve been working continuously since then — I transitioned to full-time writing about three years ago, and have more often than not pulled off the financial part of it by the seat of my pants.

I’m not above working at Subway, and I’ve already done it (twice) — the issue is mainly that fast food is above me. I’m a much better writer than I am an employee. Please protect the nice business-owners of Montreal, and protect them from my incompetence with a paid subscription (or by buying my book!)

To find out more about the company that provides the tech for this newsletter, visit Substack.com.

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People

Urban Mi’kmaq multidisciplinary artist and writer.