$ymbolocaust (2007)


The Abstract Human lives in an insignifacant world. She moans and whines and suffers the pain of the arbitrary, and abandons herself to the meaningless extacies of the flesh, neutralizes her affects in the seductive unifying forces of the collective. But the perceiver notices this human in particular, is intriguied by an inneffible glimmer of hope in this human’s eyes, and decides to unplug her. She is thus forced back into the cruel world, dissallowed an easy death. She is forced to find ways to live. The Empire of $ense promisses her the strength needed to percevere, they show her how to build a fortress, an armor, a subjectivity, strategies of order, that allow one to protect oneself from insignificance. She is tempted, but before she enters this regime, she is offered a very special gift by a mysterieous character who is both absent and present. This gift is Pashupatastra. The insignificance is now experienced as freedom, the suffering, as challenge. She can destroy and pervert known signs at will, she can create new meanings out of nothing. She has influence on the topologies that direct the body. The abstract human decides to challenge the Empire, and the Symbolic Resistance has begun.

An experimental physical and musical play directed by Alexander Wilson with Parabolik Guerilla Theatre, $ymbolocaust addresses the strategies humans adopt in order to preserve and perpetuate their subjective structures, the strategies of self-preservation, which are the operative mechanisms in society’s reproductive system. The social reproduction machine acts through the human’s common desires and continually rebuilds the architecture of meaning to include modes of resistance within itself. This culminates in $ymbolocaust, a confusion of the symbolic and semiotic, the sacred and profane, the critical and the non critical, synthetic reason and analytic ration. Through a series of overlapping symbolic moments, $ymbolocaust examines the different states of human weakness or fear before the cruelties of life, the ambivalence of language and meaning, and the indifference of nature and time. Simultaneously, the play attempts to develop an “anti-strategy”, as we explore the abstract human’s moment of potential: the symbolic resistance.

Mise en scène:Director: Alexander Wilson

Assistance à la mise en scène:Assistant Director: Mélanie Verville

Musique:Music: Alexander Wilson

Éclairage:Lighting: Émilie Bélair

Costumes: Yannick Ross

Avec:With Kathleen Wilson, Mélanie Verville, Yannick Ross, Maude Poirier-Felx, Évie Mandeville, Maelström, Phoebé Guillemot, Manu Bisson, Félix-Antoine Morin, Alex Wilson, Patrice Lépine.