This experiment with language and communication aims to put the theatre-goer into the situation of a western traveller who happens to watch a ritual event. Although the westerner may be distant from the ritual anthropologically and culturally, he or she may reach an “understanding” of it through involving him/herself emotionally and witnessing the coming forth of universal anthropological archetypes. The performance creates a language made out of sounds, tones, and cadences with no semantic meaning, but the theatre-goers are able to understand it in an immediate way through their perceptions. The intimate relationship with the audience members is created through strictly pre-conscious levels of communication: the movements with their power, breadth, and speed, the actors with their postures and blocking, and the vocal nuances. The stalls have been dismantled. The audience members find their places on a set of stands erected on the stage. The entire clear area of the stalls is covered by river gravel. The first part of the ritual takes place. There are twelve large masks, onomatopoetic sounds, footsteps on the gravel, and ritual gestures. In the second part of the ritual, a market is set up in each and every part of the theatre. There are fruits, vegetables, and spices accompanied by voices, songs, synchronised movements, and all types of sounds produced by any means possible. Films are projected onto the gravel-screen. This creates the effect of a bottomless pit. In this way this space has been blown up as it is being dramatized. The audience members have thus been involved in the performance and are invited to step down into the market. Every evening the performance is literally “eaten” by the theatre-goers. In the end only a few scraps of goods remain on the ground, as happens in almost any market. However, this is theatre.
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