Pietro FERRUA

Paradise Now

Communication. FilmsMALINA, Judith (1926-....)BECK, JulianLiving TheaterFERRUA, Pietro (Piero) Michele Stefano (1930 - ....)Film/Vidéo en ligne

1970
Director: Sheldon Rochlin (1939-2002)
Genre:
 Documentary
 Independent Cinema
 Theater [History & Instruction]
 Experimental Cinema
USA
Production Company: Paradise Productions ; Victor Herbert
• New York, N.Y. : Mystic Fire Video, [198-?]

Distribution Company: Paradise Productions

Length: 105 minutes
In French and German with English subtitles and in English.
"A videofilm of the Living Theater production, Paradise Now. A collection skits, scenes, and plays created and directed by Julian Beck and Judith Malina. "
"Shot during the last presentation of Paradise Now by The Living Theatre in Brussels, and before 7,000 spectators in Berlin, made on videotape with expressionist coloring, a unique record of this famous play by The Living Theatre, capturing the frenzy of the original." (Buyindies.com)
Very few theater groups have been more influential in this country, as well as abroad, than The Living Theater, which originated in New York almost fifty years ago. Julian Beck and Judith Malina have been admired (but also ostracized) and widely imitated, all around the world.
Portland’s Storefront Theater, whether willingly imitating them or indirectly influenced, has applied many of the same formulas: socially committed plays, mixing of genres, improvisations, dialogues and intermingling of actors and the public, use of political slogans, meditation, and so on.
The anarchist origins of this conception are visible and explicit in many of the plays of the Living Theater repertory. Paradise Now is one of them. While there is nothing anarchistic in partial or total nudity on stage or in public or in the free pot-smoking affirmation, there is obvious anarchism in other aspects, such as the denunciation of capitalistic greed and of political imperialism, the rejection of war and military service, the enslavement by the State, and so on.
This video is a live reproduction of fragments of the show as performed in Brussels in December 1969, and in Berlin, in January 1970. It is alternatively spoken in German, English and French by actors reciting indifferently in their own or in a foreign language. It became a policy of the Living Theater to accept local actors wherever they played. There are no steady roles and one senses that many of the proclamations are extemporaneous. The only “dogma” of the Living Theater is playing a “free theater”: “Choose your role and act it out!” one of them says to the public, and indeed some people from the crowd grab the message.
The Living Theater initiators and followers are typically non-violent, non-sexist, for racial fraternity and sorority, preaching for a classless, money-free society. Their anarchism comes from a combination of sources, whether mentioned or not: Thoreau, Tolstoy, Paul Goodman, etc.
Thirty years after these shows the Living Theater is still prosperous (in Italy), despite Beck’s death, and still practicing “guerrilla theater” by spreading the message in favor of an ecological, non-hierarchical society. And we are reminded that “Theater is in the street” and that “ Revolution” has no leaders, but that we all are leaders of our revolution.
Pietro Ferrua