The Peyote Dance
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
Le Voyage an Pays des Tarahumaras was published anonymously — no one knows why — in the August 1, 1937 number of La Nouvelle Revue Francaise. Two years had to pass before it was acknowledged, by publication of a letter from Artaud to Adrienne Monnier, that he was the author. --The Theater And Its Double |
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Au Pays des Tarahumaras (1937) is a text by Antonin Artaud. It was translated by Helen Weaver as The Peyote Dance (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc., 1976).
Artaud writes of his Peyote experience with the Tarahumara people in Mexico. The content of this work closely resembles the poems of his later days, concerned primarily with the supernatural. Artaud also recorded his horrific withdrawal from heroin upon entering the land of the Tarahumaras; having deserted his last supply of the drug at a mountainside, he literally had to be hoisted onto his horse, and soon resembled, in his words, "a giant, inflamed gum".
Having beaten his addiction, however, Artaud would return to opiates later in life.