ROCINANTE! ROCINANTE! A surreal journey through the restless mind of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote de la Mancha. An immersive, quirky and grotesquely unconventional promenade performance to experience a world of dreams, memories and visions.
10 Feb – 2 Mar 2012 @ 8pm Tickets: £10/£8 cons / £12 on the door. Buy Online
Rocinante! Rocinante! is the practical outcome of an ongoing research project on theatre, visual arts, music and psychiatry that aims to develop and deepen our understanding of mental illness through the study of specific cases of delusional behaviours and distorted perception of reality.
This interdisciplinary collaboration between Panta Rei Theatre Collective, Rose Bruford College, London metropolitan University and Dr Zerrin Atakan aims to translate into theatrical form the current scientific understanding of illusion and hallucination triggered by traumatic experiences such as a violent and unexpected death.
Taking inspiration from two of the most celebrated and fascinating portrays of madness – Don Quixote de la Mancha and Hamlet – the piece aims to stimulate a deeper understanding on mental illness and provocatively encourage the audience to think about the limitations of the conventional dualistic interpretation of life and its rigid separation of opposites: reality and illusion; sanity and madness; life and death; masculine and feminine.
The piece is strongly influenced by the grotesque humour of commedia dell’Arte and the Spanish Golden Age. Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings have been utilised as visual stimuli to create Don Quixote’s nightmares and visions of Hell.
video preview: http://vimeo.com/34629388
The original live music has been composed by Steve Mason.
