DON QUIXOTE
The performance is a docufiction which describes incidents from the life of the Knight of Mancha. Incidents that are described in the book, incidents inspired by it or completely re-invented.
At the same time, characters from the book and historical persons give their own opinion on the hero, expressing their support or their doubts about the way he lived. A mix of people that met Don Quichotte personally, “in real and of people that read about him afterwards and were inspired or repulsed by his life and his adventures”.
The performance follows the lonely journey of the knight from the first night he left Mancha until the time of his death.
Don Quichotte is walking on a tread-mill, walking but not really moving, while he is being surrounded by strange birds and persons with masks, young men and women running in a deserted landscape, in a weird Punishment Park, in a violent and irrational universe, where chaos reigns and all hope is gone.
It is not clear if this strange world really exists or if it is the product of the hero’s deranged mind. It is not clear if this world is the universe of the book or the real world we live in.
The production reworks the legend of the “knight of the heavy countenance” in an effort to pin down the loneliness of the man who chases windmills as he walks through a hard and incomprehensible world: a docufiction / static road movie about the adventure of being or, to quote László Krasznahorkai, the “melancholy of resistance”.
This iconoclastic performance is an attempt of Blitz Theatre Group to capture, with the help of an old myth, this modern sense that was first described by W. Burroughs and especially J.G.Ballard, where fiction and reality are distinguished by a really fine line, where fragments of fiction and dream are mixed with reality. Or as Ballard puts it, “Today, fiction has overcome reality. And by fiction, I mean television, radio, the press and politics”.
Athens, Greece
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