Váli Theatre Lab present "Baalhaus" Secondo Studio

"BaalHaus" is a research project that involves ten actors in a creation process based on the actor's dramaturgy. Each participant has created and given life to a character, starting from stimuli and suggestions triggered by the directors and pedagogues. Starting point for the work are two texts by Bertolt Brecht: "Baal", his first work, and "The Seven Deadly Sins of the Little Bourgeois", his last collaboration with Kurt Weill (Brecht wrote the libretto).

Borrowing from these two reference texts, and dramaturgical structures on the relationships between the characters, a new scenic writing was created which alternates adaptations of Brecht's texts and poems and original texts written by the dramaturg Valerio Leoni.

The directors Valerio Peroni and Alice Occhiali supervised the pedagogical path of the actors, designed the scenic set of the show, and organized a montage of the materials created in the working process.

Synopsis

The BaalHaus is a night club attended by new customers every night. The main attraction of the club is Baal, poet and artist, who spends his life there.

He is a loner who has found refuge within the walls of this place. Every night he destroys himself and the people who pass by there. An avid consumer of his own life and of the lives of the others, he never finds satisfaction or satiety. Every customer passing through the BaalHaus is inexplicably attracted to the poet and, as soon as they come in contact with him, begins a slow and inexorable descent into hell and vice.

The BaalHaus turns into a mirror of society. A world of living people made up of bourgeois, thieves, prostitutes, losers and lovers, who live in search of a fulfilment of their passions and desires, and who in the night, safely inside the four walls of the club, become primitive and instinctive, almost bestial.

Baal is the fuse that triggers these instincts in the customers. He is the pretext and justification of their primordial and unusual behaviour. Inside the club they feel justified to drop the social masks they usually wear and to live a life without limits or inhibitions.

Like Baal, the customers gain the awareness that every human being is destined to decay and decompose. They begin to live their lives without thinking about tomorrow. Baal is aware that he has to live his life in this way in order to give birth to a new cycle of his existence. Are the customers of the club conscious of this? Will they be ready to sacrifice themselves to make room for a new self or will they turn Baal into the scapegoat of all their sins leaving him alone in this Calvary?