MYSTERY-BOUFFE ADAPTATION

2017, Montpon France. Collective project and performance by and with Érica Zíngano, Marion Breton, Barbara Marcel and Tom Nóbrega as part of the festival TROIS JOURS AU TUQUET during the summer of 2017. Based on Vladimir Maiakovski´s play „Mystery-Bouffe: A Heroic, Epic and Satiric Representation of our Era” (1918-21) and its adaptation from Jerzy Grotowski (1960).

As a socialist dramatic play written by the Russian avant-gardist artist Mayakovsky between 1918 and 1921, Mystery-Bouffe proposes in its prologue that “in the future, all persons performing, presenting, reading or publishing Mystery-Bouffe should change the content, making it contemporary, immediate, up-to-the-minute.” Such suggestion, was taken by the Polish author Grotowski, who directed an adaptation of the play, presenting it for the first time at the Theatre of 13 Rows in Opole on 31 July 1960. From the diverse artistic biographies of the four artists and their different migratory contexts in Europe, the adaptation focused on an interdisciplinary collaboration, based on performative and site-specific actions in dialogue with the bucolic landscape of southern rural France.

Documentation Photos by Marianne Wasowska.








© 2021 Barbara Marcel