Tiresias

Tiresias is a strange character: a soothsayer feared for his revelations and often felt as bringer of ill omens. It certainly was the case for Oedipus who was forced to consult him to finally learn the terrible reasons for the miasma of his destiny.

Our main reasons for choosing Tiresias for the 2017 Myth and Theatre Festival can be summed up in three main points. Others will certainly come up.

• Oracular Voice. The importance of oracular models, and mantics in general. If "the voice is always a dream": how to interpret it? How does choreographic theater and a theater of images ‘speak’ to us? What is its voice in terms of narration and dramaturgy? What is a mytho-poetic theater?
• Blind Seer. To be on stage is to be inside the image, inside the dream, and therefore somehow to be a "blind seer". Performance work is to cultivate the instinct of image, to understand one’s place in the image and to take position. This means to develop the poetic animal, the visionary performer.
• Transsexual. The last conversations during the 2016 festival on Eros and Psyche often turned to gender issues and to the theatre of sexuality. Tiresias changed sex more than once in a very long life (the myth speaks of three hundred years!) He/she must be consulted!

Tiresias / Athena / Athens  #1

Lecture by Enrique Pardo

Monday 19 June  at 18:30

"What does seeing Athena nude mean?" Nicole Loraux (1943 - 2003) asks this question in one of the articles in her collection The Experience of Tiresias. There are several versions of how Tiresias became blind, and then became clairvoyant; we will speak about them. Nicole Loraux especially raises questions about the goddess Athena and thus about Athens - for example the place of women in democracy - taking a version of the myth that is not the most known. Her question is one that comes closest to the mythological and archetypal thought of James Hillman (1926 - 2011). He was founding president of the Myth et Theatre Festival and the main source of reflection and inspiration in my work. EP.
First  of two conferences (Monday June 19 and Monday 26)

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“There came a time when staying enclosed in a bud was more painful than the risk of blossoming” Anais Nin

Performance by Hélène Larrodé

At this stage the title speaks more of the process than of the content , but since that is where I am, why not repeat the phrase of Anais Nin : “There came a time when staying enclosed in a bud was more painful than the risk of blossoming” HL

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Melusine #1

Lecture by Anna Griève

Wednesday 21 June at 18:30
In French (with essential translation)

Her book The Three Crows - Towards a Science of Evil in Fairy Tales (Editions Imago, 2010), and the dialogues with Anna Griève that followed have become an integral part of Pantheatre. "There is an “ethical” accuracy in the writing of Anna Griève that I I find extraordinary - and extremely rare. For an artist, this is crucial, especially for those who want (demand) the art that is “radical”. Enrique Pardo.

Melusine: In the forest, near a spring, a man meets a woman of amazing beauty, who willingly accepts to marry him, if he agrees never to seek to know where she goes and what she does on Saturday. If he transgresses this interdict, she will disappear. He promises…

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Midnight Manifesto

Sean Lewis

Thursday 22 June , 10:30 – 13:00

Midnight Manifesto - From Brooklyn, Cowboy Stein to American Fly

(1/3 a reading of the manifesto, 1/3 a performance demonstration, 1/3 an open dialogue with Enrique Pardo and Linda Wise - a dialogue about the creations of Lilac Co in recent years, the nature of the work and what direction it takes AT present.
Sean Lewis, author, actor, director of LILAC Co. Brooklyn - one of the closest artists friends of Pantheatre. Enrique has said that Sean's work is the best in Brooklyn, i.e. in New York, i.e. (hmmm…) in the US.

Tiresias, Oedipus :
Two blind seers ...

Lecture by Claude Leroy

Saturday 24 June at 18:30

Hellenist, specializing in the evolution of mythical narratives. Author and specialist in strategic games. And a neighbor of ours in Lasalle! He will give us his point of view on Tiresias, and especially on the fate of Oedipus, who also became a blind seer.

Claude Leroy is now working on a book on the crossed functions of dream, myth and enigma. The myth as the matrix of fiction. He has published a collection of prose poems entitled Questions that Worry Cats. His aim: "writing at the level of myth". We are neighbors in more than one count!

Odor di Femina - A return of the sacred and the visible

Performance by Paola Daniele

Paola Daniele, an Italian-Parisian performance artist,  member of the Pantheatre Laboratory in Paris, presented a ritual performance during the 2016 Festival on women's blood ...
See the article” The Art of blood taboo” on her exhibition Hic is sanguis meus, 2014.
"Magical power has its origin in blood": fluids represent the place where they rise, but also the time of dichotomy.  Water is the unconscious, the initiatory source, the place where the trans-formation occurs and where the truth can manifest itself. " Laura Levi-Makarius
Paula is preparing a performance this summer in Naples (born in Calabria, she is also Neapolitan), in the underground of the ruins, with a snake, and in relation to the liquefaction of the blood of Saint Genaro.

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Tiresias / Athena / Athens #2

Lecture by Enrique Pardo

Monday 26 June at  19:00

Female, Male Transfers. An extreme case: the Galli of Late Antiquity: priests of the Goddess Cybele who emasculated themselves in ecstatic - and bloody rituals. The relativity of genres is a highly contemporary topic, as was and still is the feminization of men. Artistically: Does it matter? How? Andaccording to what criteria? I will discuss the positions of Antonin Artaud (his Heliogabalus), Carl Jung and James Hillman (their respective take on the notion of anima), Roy Hart (the 1960s and 70s), Paul B. Preciado, and a remarkable figure: Rachel PollackEP.

The Black Box

Performance by Daniela Molina
with Pierre-François Blanchard

As opposed to the sinister connotations of today’s black boxes, in this case the oracle is astonishing, even prodigious. What is more: happy and intimate. After two performances on her memories of Chile, Daniela Molina opened Pandora’s box, where harrowed lost souls wandered with a strange preference for the Versailles gardens (L'Autri-chienne, 2013) or the desert of Atacama (Animitas, 2015). In it she discovers and reinvents family secrets: fiction and reality are intertwined in The Black Box – and one word emerges (an oracle): M-Other.

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Melusine #2

Lecture by Anna Griève

Wednesday 28 June 18:30

In French (with essential translation)

Part 2. The wedding takes place and is a very happy one. The couple is blessed with love, children, riches and honors. But one day the man transgresses, and discovers, horrified, his wife bathing naked in the form of a woman-serpent. He has broken his word, she disappears, and he falls into disaster. What can we make of this tragic story? What experience does it resemble and correspond to? How to understand the interdict? What is its purpose?

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Artica y Las Magneticas

Concert Rock

Samedi 1er juillet à 21h

A la Filature du Pont de Fer
à Lasalle (5km de Malérargues)

I first met Pamela Carreño in Chile: she is a Latinist and wrote her thesis on the Sybil of Cuma - whose oracular voice haunts contemporary music, and to whom we dedicated a festival on the myths of voice: Sybils and Sirens, in 2007. With her sister Fernanda, she is a chorus singer of Artica y Las Magnéticas, a rock band. I saw them in a small cafe in Santiago in 2015. Last January I saw again at the prestigious GAM. Big success. This is sophisticated, Brechtian and Gothic rock – reminding me of the iconoclastic geniuses of Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart. They received a scholarship from the Ministry of Culture of Chile for a tour of Europe. E.P.

Price : 15 €.   Reduction under-25 / unemployed / Festival participants : 10 €

Artica y las Magnetica