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
