Luck: Myth and Theatre Festival

Pantheatre
18 June 2019 to 30 June 2019
Venue: 
Roy Hart Centre, Malérargues
Country: 
A Workshop-Festival - Master Classes - Lectures / Performances

 

13 days with 4 half-days rest.
6 hours workshops per day
plus lectures and performances
Arrivals June 17 / depart July 1st
Partial participation possible
 
Directors
Enrique Pardo and Linda Wise

Guests of Honor
Anna Griève, Amy Rome (Univ. Central Lancashire, UK) and Maria Fernandez (Festival advisor, Amsterdam)

Editorial

Luck is a talismanic word that opens the gateways to two crucial notions in the performing arts: magic and shamanism. Roberte Hamayon, the emeritus great lady of Sorbonne shamanism, brought luck back into the fore when she quipped at a doctoral student for nit-picking on the definitions of shamanism; she sentenced: “You are a shaman as long as your luck lasts.”

I was sitting next to her and practically fell off my chair! Her ‘verdict’ went straight to the core-yoke of performance – certainly the way I wish to practice it in a choreographic theatre. She said it in French: ‘as long as your chance lasts’. Chance makes matters even richer because it involves action and acting: you take a chance (risk), you take your chance (opportunity). And what to do if luck ‘befalls’ you (the etymological root of chance)? Or doesn't ? Well, you come to this festival to practice !

Luck is a skill of the highest and most acute sensitive order. It joins up with other god-terms like karma, spirit, fate, consciousness, kairos. Hamayon sums these dimensions of luck in the title of her main book: La Chasse à l’Âme – Hunting for Soul. What else are we doing in our performance laboratories other than “hunting for soul”? No soul: no luck, no quality, no art. Hamayon places the Siberian origins of shamanism in the luck factor when hunting animals. Notice the proximity between anima (the Latin for soul) and animal. Luck entails a soul ‘commerce’ with animal spirits: intuitive give-and-take moves with the keenest sense of ethical (and ecological) values regarding the very necessity to kill.

Death tempers, for sure, and weighs down the ‘happy go lucky’ connotations of luck. Puzzled friends, at first, saw luck as superficial, light and haphazard. In its magical (i.e. sympatheia) dimensions, luck simply ‘knows better’ than us - certainly in complex performance work. Animals, like weathered performers, are lucky because they “nose” it. But, on the other hand, we also know that bad luck can cast terrible shadows : misfortune and misery, random injustice, despair. All our ‘work in progress’ projects (to be presented at the festival), address the sobering undertones of luck, from schizophrenia to, especially, cancer.

The aim is to ‘cultivate luck’, to refine both the knowledge and ‘nose-ledge’ of our chances, in order (and in disorder) to make the right, or necessary wrong moves. To ‘shamanize’ is to move luck and performance into poetic justice.

Enrique Pardo
Director

 

REGISTRATION INFORMATION

The Festival is a yearly gathering of artists, performers, scholars and the curious (ages 12 to 82 - last year!). Founded in 1987 with James Hillman, it brings together mytho-poetic thinking and performance practice.
 
Registration fees and dates are as inclusive as possible, especially for returning friends. Students are very welc  lodging. So, book earliest and consult our tips for nearby guesthouses, and good campings. (June is still off-season!) Check travel advice too.
 
Fees
 
950 € full fee
650 € long term training
450 € active members
300 € interns
 
Fees part-time registration
75 € per day
 
Pantheatre yearly membership and civil insurance is obligatory : extra 20€
 
 
Luck - Pantheatre
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