Vision Statement
Antero Alli, Director
The idea for "Bardoville" came about while pondering the current sociopolitical landscape and watching the world as I knew it collapsing behind me with the new world not yet in sight. I am reminded of the Tibetan Buddhist term "bardo" which refers to the 49-day intermediary stage between human incarnations. As a culture, I think we are currently passing through a major bardo, an epic state between states, where the future remains unknown yet also open to the potentials of creation. However, before we can create a new future we must face the cultural karma of hypocrisy in ourselves and in world leaders and, the proliferation of scapegoat rituals and racial profiling that divide us as people. I wanted to explore this bardo idea as a setting where an organic complexity could unfold spontaneously between three related groups: 1) a poet performing his work before an audience 2) seven chiefly nonverbal characters taking the stage at whim 3) a women's improvisational vocal ensemble. The end of this performance would culminate in a scapegoat ritual (see video clip below).
"Bardoville" (final scene) from Antero Alli on Vimeo.
The seven characters developed during 2-Faced Clowns", a 10-week ParaTheatrical Research Lab explored personal and collective hypocrisies as a foundation for physical characterizationsof exaggerated aspects of our own contrary natures. My wife and collaborator (since 1989), Sylvi joined this ritual experiment while rehearsing independently with E.V.E. (Experimental Vocal Ensemble) towards improvising vocal creations for the performance. I met with Randal S. Slager over five Sundays to find the integrity and the right tone to voicing Bukowski's poetry.
What happened in BARDOVILLE, and how it happened, transformed with each and every rehearsal and each performance; no performance was ever, could ever be, the same. The seven Paratheatre-trained performers onstage applied methods allowing for high levels of unpredictability and an organic unfolding of spontaneous interactions; nothing was choreographed. These performers also did not relate to, or confront, or pay attention to the audience; those interactions belonged to the Poet. The women of E.V.E. (guided by Sylvi Alli) offered vocal creations accenting the moment-to-moment dynamics onstage as it unfolded; their sounds and tones also transformed with each performance.
As with every film and experimental theatre work I develop and produce, the underlying vision remains the same: Insurrection of the Poetic Imagination. I am not interested in offending the audience with any film or theatre of "ideas or messages or morality or politics"; we have been schooled and churched enough! My aim is to incite a series of tiny riots in the Imagination -- a kind of poetic terrorism -- by evoking strong visceral and spiritual resonances in the audience. This would not be possible without the performers' total commitment to their own visceral and spiritual resonances and the risks they take towards performing a total offering of the self.
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Antero Alli, Memorie Eden, Randal S. Slager (background), Wendy Allegaert
Antero Alli, Sylvi Alli, ParaTheatrical ReSearch
Artistic and Musical Director Bios; The Collective
BARDOVILLE - THE REHEARSAL PROCESS
Paratheatrical approach to performance