MALDOROR

stage version of the text: Ani Vaseva
director: Ani Vaseva
theory: Boyan Manchev
graphic design: Georgi Sharov
photography: Boryana Pandova

with: Leonid Yovchev

Premiere – October 2015, Institut Français de Bulgarie

Les Chants de Maldoror, the legendary for the last centuries avant-gardes oeuvre was published in 1896 under the penname Comte de Lautréamont by the enigmatic Isidore Ducasse and re-discovered half a century later by the surrealists. The macabre hallucinations of Lautréamont are not only haunted by inherited from the Romantic repertoire ghosts – dark heroes, strange creatures, hybrid monsters, rampant elements – but they also introduce a new idea of poetic language, tensed between authenticity and artificiality, truthfulness and irony. Thus Lautréamont opens the horizon of a world with endless potentiality (of imagination), in order to close it just a few months later with the corrosive auto-parody of Poésies. This new form of poetic language and its dramatic potential are of specific interest to Metheor. That is why Maldoror is performance focused in the first place on the text: performance, based on constant and exhaustive work on the grammar of movement and the vocal score, in order to embody Lautréamont’s anxious fantasies, transforming them into contemporary theatre. Thus, continuing the experiments of the explored by the group genre of theatre oratiro, Metheor aims to experience the possibilities of a literary or poetic theatre, opposed both to the poetic reading and the stage adaptation. Through the physical and technical mobilization of the text-material the literary theatre attempts to actualize the potentiality of literary fiction language on the same level as the transformed intensity, strived at by the last century theatre oppositely through overcoming language, narration and representation. Poetical theatre beyond the machinery of conflict, catastrophe and catharsis. The nightmarish world of Maldoror as upside-down world of pleasure. Monsters are accomplished desires.

Maldoror – Recording