This episode highlights Thieves Theatre’s 1983/84 production “The Marat/Sade” in Toronto and how it crystalized the paratheater aesthetic that would lead to The Hill.
The project began as a theater workshop, led by Gabriele and Nick, with members of an activist anti-psychiatry group of mental patients called On Our Own. The Peter Weiss’s play with the 17-word title – “The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum at Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade” – was then adapted, site-specifically, to Toronto’s nightlife scene.
Some of the On Our Own members were also in the punk rock music scene, and after Thieves Theatre put out a call for actors, a motley crew of punks, psychiatric survivors, and actors began a six-month-long rehearsal and production process that placed theater and real life into the same performance kettle. As such, the production can be seen as a precursor to Thieves Theatre’s project six years later involving the “tipi on the hill.”
This episode also explains how “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West” show in the 1880’s was the ultimate paratheatrical work informing both The Marat/Sade and “The Living Museum of the Nomad Monad” (The Hill) in that it seamlessly intertwined performance and real life into a single fictive reality.
#TheCameronHouse, #TorontoFilmFestival, #PaulKelman, #MyBloodyValentine, #MadMax #NedBuntline, #AstorPlaceRiot, #BuntlineSpecial, #SittingBull, #PineRidge, #WoundedKneeMassacre, #GhostDance, #YellowHandIncident, #TheatrePasseMureille, #PeterBrook #kultur, #counterculture #alternativetheater #indietheater
For extensive documentation and to purchase the book, "The Hill": thievestheatre.org
Contact Nick and Gabriele at [email protected]
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