What is it ?
The objective of Psychotronic Grand-Guignol Project is the creation of contemporary theatre of the uncanny.
The theoretical framework of our creations is based on the famous essay by Freud The Uncanny and also from interpretations of this freudian unheimlich made by authors such as Hal Foster. This approach involves the study and practice of expressions that link the scene and the unheimlich, such as puppet theatre, theatre of objects and, to a certain extent, physical theatre and contemporary dance. The work of groups such as El Periférico de Objetos and artists such as Tadeusz Kantor have been constant references.
However, we consider that the unheimlich has manifested itself more fully in two expressions from which this project has taken its name: the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol and psychotronic cinema.
The directors of the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, a small Parisian venue that was active during the first half of the 20th century, decided to offer their audiences the naturalistic staging of horrifying scenes. Dramatists such as André de Lorde, Henri Bauche, Maurice Level and Pierre Chaine, to name a few, were recruited to do this. With works such as Crime in the Asylum, The Garden of Trials, The Castle of Slow Death and The Child's Executioner, they created a new dramatic form: the grand-guignolesque drama.
Psychotronic cinema, on the other hand, played with the unheimlich in an even more daring way. The financial limitations of its creators brought with it a huge thematic and narrative freedom that used to be forbidden to large budget productions. Films such as Bloodsucking freaks and The Erotic Nights of the Living Dead show something that (according to the neoclassical canon, quite respected by Hollywood cinema) should be put out of sight: bodies identified as matter, whether from pornography or gore. However, the effort to surprise the viewer goes beyond these images of the obscene. The unexpected mix of cinematographic genres and the violation of the language of classical cinema contribute significantly to provoke a certain perplexity. While the grand- dramas tell their stories from a sensasionalistic realism, the psychotronic cinema is devoted to narrate impossible stories (because of its taste for excess) that play with poetry and humor.
Beyond its extreme violence and apparent sensationalism, the real issue of grand-guignolesque drama and psychotronic cinema is to suggest, through the representation of pain, sexuality, illness, madness, and death, that what we call Self is just a mask that disguises our true self: a fragile body that is almost an object, animated flesh that seems to have its own desires and will, matter in which we do not want to recognize ourselves.
The main purpose of Psychotronic Grand-Guignol Project is not to create a museum, recovering old plays and movies, but to rethink this issue for the present playing with the language of the 21st century theatre.
