ANTONIN ARTAUD'S
THE THEATRE AND THE PLAGUE
A cinematic project conceived, directed and produced by
WOLFGANG PANNEK
Based on the essay by
ANTONIN ARTAUD
A TAANTEATRO production
Contributing Artists from 5 continents. 18 short movies. 1 movie.
Contributing artists:
Florence de Mèredieu (France), Nabil Chahhed (Tunisia), Trausti Ólafsson (Iceland), Jorge Ndlozy (Mozambique), Wolfgang Pannek (Germany), Reha Bliss (Russia), Candelaria Silvestro (Argentina), Nourit Masson-Sékiné (France) , Théophile Choquet (France), Or Kittikong (Thailand), Jürgen Müller-Popken (Switzerland), Insa Popken (Germany), Shane Pike (Australia), Maura Baiocchi (Brazil)
Final video weaving and subtitles: Brunade Araujo (USA)
Final editing and sound design: Wolfgang Pannek
Website: Mônica Cristina Bernardes
Subtitles based on the translation by Mary Caroline Richards
The Theatre and the Plague
In the archives of the small town of Cagliari, Sardinia, lies an account of an astonishing historic occurrence.
One night, about the end of April or the beginning of May 1720, some twenty days before the ship Grand-Saint-Antoine reached Marseille, where its landing coincided with the most wondrous outbreak of plague to be recorded in that city’s history, Saint-Rémy, the Sardinian Viceroy, perhaps rendered more sensitive to that most baleful virus by his restricted monarchical duties, had a particularly agonizing dream. He saw himself plague-ridden and saw the disease ravage his tiny state.
Society’s barriers became fluid with the effects of the scourge. Order disappeared. He witnessed the subversion of all morality, a total psychological breakdown, heard his lacerated, utterly routed bodily fluids murmur within him in a giddy wasting-away of matter, growing heavy and then gradually being transformed into carbon. Was it too late to ward off the scourge? Although organically destroyed, crushed, extirpated, his very bones consumed, he knew one does not die in dreams, that our will-power even operates ad absurdum, even denying what is possible, in a kind of metamorphosis of lies reborn as truth.
He awoke. He would show himself able to drive away these plague rumours and the miasmas of the oriental virus.
