2025 Myth and Theatre Festival
Chiaroscuro
July 1 to 13 2025
Last updated: 20 / 04 / 2025
Image : Caravaggio’s Conversion of Saint Paul on the road to Damascus – « knocked off his high horse ».
Graphics EP – See original image and excellent article by Carla Pietrobattista LINK
The 2025 Myth and Theatre Festival is part of a seemingly never-ending cycle on MAGIC – and, maybe it is never-ending because « Magic is the broadest and richest horizon of human agency and thought ».
We started by calling upon the CHIAROSCURO genius of Caravaggio (1571 – 1610), with the intention of using the summer sun rays that slice the penumbra of the Magnanerie, the converted silkworm “factory” in Southern France where we will be working.
The festival offers multilayered voice and performance hands-on laboratories with parallel lectures and debates on topics such as magic, death, utopias – and their advent in PERFORMANCE.
2025 also marks a critical and grave testimonial: the 50th anniversary of the car crash that took the lives of Roy Hart, Dorothy Hart and Viviane Young on May 18th 1975 – only months after the “miraculous” purchase of the domain of Malerargues. « The accident, as it is still referred to, was the most powerful MAGICAL event in my life, tragic and tormenting. It made one thing clear to me: Magic can not be confined to optimistic illusions. »
The Festival will follow up its “defense and illustration” of Roy Hart and of James Hillman, the main inspirational geniuses of Pantheatre, and give the floor once again to both Xavier Papaïs, whom I consider the leading contemporary thinker on MAGIC, and to Sonu Shamdasani, historian of psychology (co-author, with James Hillman, of Lament of the Dead – Psychology after Jung’s Red Book.)
Other guest contributors, lecturers and performers will be announced soon.
Enrique Pardo
The Festival PROGRAM is currently under development. It will be online early May
Visit the INSCRIPTION FORM (you can already reserve a place), the PRACTICAL INFORMATION page and make sure you have subscribe to our NEWSLETTER.
TWO MAIN WORKING APPROACHES
Voice & SINGING
Direction : Linda Wise
With a pianist (tbc)
Taking Roy Hart’s extended voice work into singing, performance and interpretation.
If you think of genius as intimate, personal and emotional, it will show up, maybe in the texture and timbre of your voice, or in the moves you make, vocal and physical. This is what ‘singing’ is all about.
Choreographic Theatre
Direction : Enrique Pardo
with the members of his Paris Laboratory and guest artists
Choreographic Theatre : training in chorus disciplines that bring out personal genius… « Rules are made to confirm exceptions ».
“I understand choreography especially in terms of “making a move”: an esthetic AND ethical initiative, acted out.” My definition of IMPROVISATION: “Imps at work”. EP.
The workshop-festival takes place at Malerargues, a pastoral paradise in the Cevennes foothills, Southern France, near Nimes, Montpellier and Marseille – in collaboration with the ROY HART CENTRE, with its theatre spaces (the large building on the photo, a magnificent old silk-worms ‘factory’ called a ‘magnanerie’), six working studios, some 12 pianos, in a domain of 30 hectares of Mediterranian forests –surrounding the hamlet and including a sturdy huguenot château ! (See below.) Pantheatre’s Library is installed in the chateau’s chapel, at the back of the image behind the tall cypresses.
Malerargues & Roy Hart Centre (a drone overview!)
The Festival?
The Myth and Theatre Festival was created in 1986 under de auspices and presidency of American writer and psychologist James Hillman
It is Pantheatre’s yearly key event, intertwining performance practice with cultural studies, especially in mythology and anthropology.
2022 23 Seminars
2022 Fall Cycle
2022 Summer Program
2022 Spring Cycle
2020 Festival
2021 Festival
2022 Festival
2023 Festival
2024 Festival
Enrique’s BLOG
Direction Enrique Pardo with Linda Wise
Assistant Director, Daniela Garcia
Media Organisation Debora Ballardini
with Eloïse DeNayer
in collaboration with
Roy Hart International Artistic Centre
La Compagnie des Chimistes
Pantheatre Active Members
Paris Laboratory Members
Mairie of Lasalle & Mairie of Thoiras
Pantheatre’s training is both advanced AND open to all: much more a question of attitude, personality and willingness to take risks, than of technical, musical or theatre skills – which, of course, are more than welcome.
Most participants have an interest in performance: physical or text-based theatre, danse or singing. Pantheatre’s training is a SYNTHESIS of these, applied to voice performance, singing and choreographic theatre.
Collaborators
Assistant Teachers and Performers
Daniela Garcia, Eloïse DeNayer, Axel Chia, (Cie. Chimistes.)
Alice Bellefroid, Maya Lewandowski, Pauline Nozière
Social Media
(English & Spanish) : Debora Balardini, Querena, Adriana Medina
Chile Associate Companies
Pantheatre Chile / Universidad de Chile / UCCLAN Chile
Direction Annie Murath
The Directors
My ‘cutting-edge’ work happens, unquestionably, in LABORATORIES, from where a whole series of performances, magnificent collaborations, have emerged. I call these Folies à Deux: intertwined transfers towards what is perhaps my main goal: psychological creativity. My role: laboratory director, the one Alchemy called ARTIFEX: artificer, catalyst and, why not, shaman: « You are a shaman as long as your luck lasts » (Roberte Hamayon). With age I seem to be getting luckier. This is beautifully described by Florence Derail in an email that ends like this:
« This workshop-Laboratory:
– is not a therapeutic place – despite the benevolence that prevails in them,
– it is a place where each participant, whatever his or her possible initial blockings, is placed in a state of hyper-creativity and hyper-receptivity, where intuition grows at a very fast pace.
– It’s a laboratory in the strongest sense, a place of experimentation [for whom? For everyone, including Enrique Pardo.] »
And THE VOICE in all this? I like an (indirect) definition by Giorgio Agamben: « Listening to the voice in speech, is what thinking is all about ». I also go along with Roy Hart’s favorite quote: « The voice is the muscle of the soul », after H. W. Longfellow. I say that I could be one of Roy Hart’s top lawyers, of his life, work and philosophy – while not necessarily agreeing with everything he did or said, especially fifty years later. EP
Enrique Pardo
© photo : Javier Riano de Echanove
Linda Wise
© photo : Javier Riano de Echanove
Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one. Socrates
I climbed through the looking glass at 10, as Alice, into the magic world of theatre: the joy of dancing with words, the elation of singing – and, no nerves! At 13 I knew Hamlet inside/out, (I was every night in the prompt box!): all I wanted to do was theatre. With friends, we created our first companyThe Young Players. I did stumble on some opposition, and some depressions, but at 18, I made it to the Royal Scottish Academy, and, at 19, I met Roy Hart’s group in London. A turning point. I became “passionately engaged with a vision of the voice that found its embodied roots with Roy Hart”. LW. read more