Parabolik Guerilla Theatre

The Abstract Human lives in an insignifacant world. She moans and whines and suffers the pain of the arbitrary, and abandons herself to the meaningless extacies of the flesh, neutralizes her affects in the seductive unifying forces of the collective. But the perceiver notices this human in particular, is intriguied by an inneffible glimmer of hope in this human's eyes, and decides to unplug her. She is thus forced back into the cruel world, dissallowed an easy death. She is forced to find ways to live. The Empire of $ense promisses her the strength needed to percevere, they show her how to build a fortress, an armor, a subjectivity, strategies of order, that allow one to protect oneself from insignificance. She is tempted, but before she enters this regime, she is offered a very special gift by a mysterieous character who is both absent and present. This gift is Pashupatastra. The insignificance is now experienced as freedom, the suffering, as challenge. She can destroy and pervert known signs at will, she can create new meanings out of nothing. She has influence on the topologies that direct the body. The abstract human decides to challenge the Empire, and the Symbolic Resistance has begun.

$ymbolocaust : An Experimental Play Directed by Alexander Wilson & Parabolik Guerilla

$ymbolocaust is the conceptual sequel to our last large-scale theatre production, A Ship to Namuh, directed by Melanie Verville, which we presented in 2005. It is an experimental physical and musical play that addresses the strategies humans adopt in order to preserve and perpetuate their subjective structures: strategies of self-preservation. Through a series of overlapping symbolic moments, $ymbolocaust examines the different states of human weakness or fear before the cruelties of life, the ambivalence of language and meaning, and the indifference of nature and time. Simultaneaously, the play attempts to develop an "anti-strategy", as we explore the abstract human's moments of potential: the symbolic resistance

Inspirations: Though it is strictly not a Butoh performance, $ymbolocaust owes much of its physical approach to this Japanese tradition, particularly its training exercises aimed at collapsing subjective structures. All of the current cast has had at least minimal formal training in the art of Butoh, and our newest members were recruited from Butoh workshops. Other important influences for $ymbolocaust are the symbolic and abstract styles of Romeo Castellucci (Societas Rafaello Sanzio), Tadeusz Kantor, and Robert Wilson.

Treatment: Following many of Antonin Artaud's proposals for a Theatre of Cruelty, $ymbolocaust invites the public into an immersive performance environement, in which the action happens all around and between the spectators, and wherever possible, uses technology to extend the physical, emotional and conceptual aspects of the performance into the show space. Since there is no spatial division between the public and the performers, as there is in traditional theatre, the spectators are costumed before they enter into the performance space, to mask their civilian identities and to ensure a common aesthetic for the play. Evoking the landscape of a dream, the atmosphere for the play is dark, hazy and resonant, and composes elements of reality according to an unkown, mysterious logic. There are no dialogues in the play, and its scenes are made up of physically-demanding performances, around symbolic or conceptual themes. Always in between states, the play weaves tensions between emotions, seducing the spectator to laugh at what is strictly not funny, or recognize the most innocent images as vehicles of evil.

Technology: Custom-built electronic sound and performance devices are used to create environmental soundscapes that extend the performers' actions through sound. Half of our performers are equipped with tiny wireless microphones that are positioned in critical parts of their body, and pick-up minute textures, breathing, vocal sounds, the rustling of clothing, the manipulation of objects, etc. In addition to sound, we also capture the abstract movement of the performances in order to drive musical and visula parameters. Wireless accelerometers are embedded into certain costumes, and feed information about the performers movements to our custom software patches. This allows certain real-time environmental media parameters, such as lighting, sound, and video, to be actuated or modulated by the movement of the performers body. The technology is not overtly exposed, as it is with other productions which make use of similar technology, but seamlessly integrated into subtle mediatic extensions of the performers body.

Dramaturgy: Since our theatre does not begin with scripts or dialogue, $ymbolocaust's dramaturgy is develloped dynamically through physical excercise workshops based on the "mind and body" (MB) training of Japan's Butoh. We begin with events, situations, or philosophical concepts, that I bring to the rehearsals. Then as a group, we devise movement exercises and experments aiming to materialize the theme in question, without representing it, or imitating it. These improvisations produce abstract, spontaneous and collective expressions that could not have been preconceived in writing, and thus generate an aura of authenticity around the work.