PARZIVAL
Backa Teater, Gothenburg
September 2014 - Feburary 2015

To create a scenic pop-saga for teenagers, based on Wolfram von Eschenbach’s epic poem about Parzival, is an idea as utterly courageous as it is brilliant. Parzival from the beginning has no name, or gender - all they have is their beauty and their longing desire In Anders Paulin’s brilliantly exact staging there are no conventional parts. The identities run as freely raised children between the actors. Forget the idea that kids demand high speed tempo and editing. The young audience of the opening night is totally concentrated. By means of mirrors, water, face paint and a stage containing nothing but a white carpet the actors seem to create life out of thin air.
Expressen

Medieval cleansing.
Storytelling so consequently unbarked that one marvels.
Ritual wow-mode and tranquil humor.
Aftonbladet

A simultaneously smart and charmingly unanxious performance
Göteborgsposten

Parzival was an exploration of how to make a translation of the objectives and tools based on non-mimetic storytelling in projects like Neither You Nor Me and Three White Soldiers to the context of youth theatre.
The story as a landscape to get lost, like Parzival wandering in the woods with its unknown contents and meanings. The text as our Graal - it can not be found if you´re looking for it; only they who search without searching can find.
With music composed by electropop duo The Marble Fauns.

“The face itself is redundancy. It is itself in redundancy with the redundancies of signifiance or frequency, and those of resonance or subjectivity. The face constructs the wall that the signifier needs in order to bounce off of; it constitutes the wall of the signifier, the frame or screen. The face digs the hole that subjectification needs in order to break through; it constitutes the black hole of subjectivity as consciousness or passion, the camera, the third eye.
Concrete faces cannot be assumed to come ready-made. They are engendered by an abstract machine of faciality, which produces them at the same time as it gives the signifier its white wall and subjectivity its black hole. Thus the black hole/white wall system is, to begin with, not a face but the abstract machine that produces faces according to the changeable combinations of its cogwheels. Do not expect the abstract machine to resemble what it produces.”
from A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze & Guattari