VIDEO DOCUMENTS
Directed & produced by Antero Alli
(1991-2023)
ParaTheatrical ReSearch video documents are featured here through two modalities: 1) private, non-performance Ritual Labs ("Archaic Community",1991; "CRUX", 1999; "dreambody/earthbody", 2012; "4 Stages of Work", 2020) and 2) public performance rituals ("Orphans of Delirium", 2004; "A Turbulence of Muses", 2016; "Bardoville", 2017; "Soror Mystica" 2017; "Fallen Monsters", 2018; "Escape from Chapel Perilous", 2018). In addition to these videos, the recent "Innerview" (2023) features a discussion on the legacy of this Paratheatre medium.
Click the VIEWING LINK in each section below for video
"Innerview: Part 1,2,&3"
(2023; total running time 2 hrs.14 min.)
Click image for ParaTheatrical ReSearch Archives site
Interview on the legacy of ParaTheatrical ReSearch.
In 2005, Brazilian native Joao Peixoto discovered Antero Alli's Paratheatre in his books and began applying its methods in solo ritual work over the next twelve years. In 2017, he boarded a flight to Portland Oregon and joined one of Alli's weekend intensive workshops. Returning to Brazil, Joao started initiating his own Paratheatre labs while consulting Antero by email about facilitating groups in his ritual medium. A long distance apprenticeship developed. Joao asked Antero if he could visit him for an interview on his life's work in Paratheatre. Alli agreed and Joao arrived at his Portland home over three days in mid-January of 2023 to film this 3-part interview.
---> Part One VIEWING LINK
---> Part Two VIEWING LINK
---> Part Three VIEWING LINK
Click image for list of paratheatre methods
Paratheatre demonstration; written & spoken by Antero Alli
2020; 10 minutes. A group of seven demonstrates four stages of Paratheatrical work: 1) The 5-phase Physical Warm-up 2) Non-directional Jogging 3) No-Form Practice and 4) Conscious Projection. I explain the processes of each stage as they unfold. Together, all four stages typically take about the first hour of a 3-hour session, providing support for the ritual structures introduced afterward. Five of these ritual structures are outlined in detail in my book, STATE OF EMERGENCE: Experiments in Group Ritual Dynamics (2020; Original Falcon Press; 180 pages). -- Antero
---> VIEWING LINK
"Escape from Chapel Perilous"
(Dec. 2018; 59 min.)
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Performance featuring the poetry of Sylvia Plath
Chapel Perilous, a dimension beyond the time/space continuum where living souls leave their physical bodies, as in dreams, performing rituals of obsession until returning to human embodiment. Meanwhile, two wayward monks wander into the Chapel to hear Father Timeless deliver his sermons (poems by Sylvia Plath) to the newly arrived congregation of lost souls (the audience). The intent, as with all our paratheatrical performances, was to incite spiritual and visceral resonances in the audience beyond any linear narrative. With live vocals by Sylvi Alli as "Mad Mary". I created the projected film sequences and improvised electric guitar on site. - Antero
---> VIEWING LINK
"Fallen Monsters"
(May 2018; 64 min.)
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Performance featuring the poetry of William Blake
This production explored the interaction between the Child and Adult functions of personality through rituals that dramatized the contract they share. Our musical director Sylvi Alli developed melodies for six of William Blake's "Songs of Innocence & Experience" . I edited a film collage of Blake's visionary paintings projected onscreen while Sylvi performs the six songs and the performers deveop their rituals. I also portrayed “The Voice”, delivering a series of self-negating messages that we've all heard from parents, teachers, schoolyard bullies, the workplace, the world. The monster masks in the final ritual were inspired by how the performers perceived Adult Monsters in their childhood. “FALLEN MONSTERS” celebrates the resiliency of the Creative Spirit, in Blake, in children and all committed artists, to survive trauma and any attempts to oppress the joy of creation. - Antero
---> VIEWING LINK
VISION STATEMENT
how this performance came about
"Soror Mystica:
Ritual Invocation of the Anima"
(Dec. 2017; 50 min.)
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Performance featuring the poetry of HD (Hilda Doolittle)
"SOROR MYSTICA follows the transmutation of the alchemist through the (inter)action of the four elements—each endowed with their own agency, each enacting their own rituals, not subservient to the alchemist but welcoming him into their temple—and the masked shadow man who dwells at the threshold and drives the querent’s transfiguration. All this further fractures the frame, because we see these people both as actors enacting a rite and as the incorporeal substances and energies which they are embodying. The miraculous thing about all of this is the performers are openly working for their own benefit." - Matthew Andrews, Oregon Artswatch.
---> VIEWING LINK
VISION STATEMENT
how this performance came about
"Bardoville"
(May 2017; 42 min.)
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Performance featuring the poetry of Charles Bukowski
"With ritual design/theatrical direction by Antero Alli, Bardoville displays elements of classical tragedy/drama such as confrontation/conflict/resolution. The flow from scene to scene retained a narrative integrity around which each character acts and reacts like jazz soloists departing and returning to a melodic structure and interactive core. Sylvi Alli crafted the musical and aural accompaniment with her highly flexible and colorfully timbred chorus (E.V.E.) to accentuate Bukowski’s poetic peculiarities." - Mitch Ritter, Oregon ArtsWatch.
---> VIEWING LINK
VISION STATEMENT
how this performance came about
"A Turbulence of Muses"
(Dec. 2016; 39 min.)
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Performance featuring the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud
A symbolist ritual for eight performers, each representing a different aspect of one entity -- the poet Arthur Rimbaud -- undergoing a systematic disorganization of all the senses towards the creation of poetry. After I scripted the initial ritual design, the production was further developed with the cast over ten Sunday nights until it came to fruition for the first time before a live audience on December 2, 3, & 4, 2016 at Performance Work NW, in Portland OR where this document was filmed. - Antero
---> VIEWING LINK
VISION STATEMENT
Antero Alli on the process behind the performance
"dreambody/earthbody"
(2012/2021; 72 min.)
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Dreaming Ritual demonstration; written by Antero Alli.
Seven individuals explore a ritual choreography created from movements recalled from their nocturnal dreams. This process bypasses dream analysis in favor of tapping the Unconscious as a wellspring of creative force unleashed in patterns of motion, form, presence, and sound. The video also features the group demonstrating paratheatre methods alongside participant interviews, dramatic re-enactments of my own dreams, and a lush musical score by Sylvi Alli, who also appears as "Naiad, a dreamtime entity". - Antero
"Alli’s technique involves using the body as a resource, and his work follows from the premise that deep knowledge of human culture and history can also be found by listening deeply to our muscles, bones, and by fully inhabiting our physical selves. It is remarkable how using movements remembered from dreams seems to unleash powerful memories and feelings from the unconscious." - David Finkelstein 4-stars out of 5 - filmthreat.com)
---> VIEWING LINK
PARATHEATRICAL DREAMING RITUAL
Source material for this documentary
"DREAMBODY/EARTHBODY": Interview with Antero Alli
by Isabel Fondevila for A.T.A. (January 14, 2013)
"Orphans of Delirium"
(May 2004; 84 min.)
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Written by Antero Alli.
Performance featuring poetry of Samuel Coleridge
Over four months, I trained eleven individuals in paratheatre methods towards developing initiatic rtuals that were performed before a stunned San Francisco audience in May of 2004. The performances also incorporated segments from Coleridge's hallucinatory prose "Kubla Khan" with additional story elements about a drunken actor reminiscing on lost loves and beliefs about God. Also featured are candid discussions between myself and two of the performers one night over several bottles of Merlot. Music during the performances was performed live on site by Sylvi Alli. - Antero
THE DIRECTOR AND TWO PERFORMERS SHARE THEIR EXPERIENCE
"CRUX"
(Summer 1999; 80 min.)
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Document of a private Paratheatre Lab.
Written by Antero and the participants.
In the summer of 1999 in Berkeley California seven individuals underwent a paratheatrical experiment to expose and embody the crux of what they were living for. I narrated my perceptions of their stories and included excerpts from their ritual journals that they narrated themselves. What unfolds is a series of confessions and confrontations with what it means to be crucified to the cross of one’s own existence, to wake up to that reality and live with it. This video is not about Christianity or Jesus but an exploration of the universal crucifixion archetype. - Antero
"CRUX is a unique documentary, a fascinating look into one of Antero Alli’s paratheatrical research labs. In CRUX, we are given tantalizing glimpses into the results this ritual exploration has on each participant: shots of insane, uncontrollable laughter; screaming, wailing, and writhing; wild movement and energy that seems to possess them at times." - Scotto Moore, TRIP Magazine)
---> VIEWING LINK
"CRUX OF THE MATTER"
On the Making of CRUX
"Archaic Community"
(Autumn 1991; 87 min.)
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A docufiction feature written by Antero Alli.
Seattle, WA. Autumn 1991. For six weeks, three times a week, 3 to 4 hours each session, twelve virtual strangers met with me to undergo an intensive paratheatrical training process to discover how rituals might work without dogma. Their story is presented in a series of interviews accompanied by video documentation of the rituals. All of this is placed within the context of a character (based on a real person/event) outside this paratheatrical experiment who keeps calling me on the phone trying to pry information about the Archaic Community project without wanting to be part of it, or does he? - Antero
In ARCHAIC COMMUNITY, participants cast off the conditioning of cultural restraint. In the process of a rigorous physical meditation they a achieve a state of NO-FORM (a term borrowed from Shunryu Suzuki) to become receptive to the influence of universal archetypes and become vehicles for their expression. A gamut of emotional colors threaten to run off the canvas in this video/performance art, yet are contained within the frame of the storyline, giving the piece continuity and accessibility. -Community Catalyst, Seattle WA
---> VIEWING LINK
paratheatre links
Click above for paratheatre bio
ANTERO INTERVIEWED ON PARATHEATRE
"UNDOING THE WORLD" (PARATHEATRE MANIFESTO)