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The Festival Carnival

    Peter Burke attributes to the new years eve and carnival parties, parties of alimentary and sexual excesses and even violences, almost like a bracket that comes up in the middle of the year, as a valve of vent of the instinctiveness repressed in the rest of the months or, according to the interpretation of Renè Guenon it is the least high tendencies of man. Bachtin attributes it as a function valve of political vent and social control to these parties since it allows the equality moods and antiinstitutional to be institutionally controlled. If these tendencies could not receive that minimum satisfaction it could risk to explode and to extend their effects to the whole existence, individually and collectively, causing a disorder much more heavier than that some particular day can produce at the end.

    Mircea Eliade supports that the looseness, the jubilation, the orgy (both talking about the babylonian carnival either of the dionisiache parties of Saturnali) are not other than the representation of a cosmogonic myth: the moment of the mixing up of every energy than preluded to the recreation of the year. The orgy in opportunity of the ceremonies of the new year was a regression to the darkness, the restoration of the early chaos which in as such was preceding every demonstration of organized strengths. The unchaining of the licence, affirms Mircea Eliade, the violation of all the prohibitions, the coincidence of all the contraries to other what the dissolution of the world and the restoration of the early illud tempus which is the moment of the beginning (chaos) and of the end (deluge or apocalypse)

 
    But the carnival as it should be aimed to be is not functional any more to the contemporary civilization which prefers a homogeneous and linear time and place of what cyclic, does not have space for the social parties and the days they boringly run in the alternation of working time and of holiday. Sure that the psyche informs, also if darkly, the presence of ineradicable archetypes is not able to suit the linear conception so from this removed it is born the collective neurosis of the joyous one, left caricature which every honest people has to withdraw to be horrified.

    The "carnival has died" he affirms Bloch and to decree the end, adds Baroja, it was to affirm him he of a conception of pagan, néné life Christian but simply secoularize. A bureaucratic secularism which has regulated it according to social order criterions, of good honesty taste reducing it to a poor normal routine entertainment. The carnival has died! We we have occupied with passion through the theatre, for at least a thirty-year period, have placed, with our shows, the ambitious aim to return some fragment of the ancient emotion.

 

Luca Bianco - artistic director of the Ass. Theatrical Hybris

Theatrical Association Hybris: Via Conversano, 4  -  70017 Putignano (Ba)        phone:  +393406172533       E-mail:  info@hybris.ba.it