Atsara by Stefano Vizioli - English version

Our two Atsara in action

Rehearsals with the dancers and musicians from the Royal Academy of Performing Arts in Bhutan finish today. It has been a week full of discoveries, uncertainty, misunderstandings, collaboration and friendship ... two days ago I began to develop a possible story line with the Atsara in relation to the entrance of Polyphemus that opens the second part of Acis and Galatea.

The Atsara could be thought of as the elves that inhabit this part of the world who wear masks that are both provocative and disruptive, much loved by the Bhutanese public who consider these masks the emanation of the divine exactly because of their madness and absolute freedom of expression. 

It is both strange and difficult to accept the sacred nature of these mad libertines but I am assured that this is the case. What excites and disturbs me most is that there are many similarities with expressions familiar to my own cultural background: the Atsara wears a grotesque red mask with a distorted canine smile, an enormous nose and black oblong eyes with facial warts here and there ... my mind goes immediately to the primitive Harlequins of the Italian Commedia dell’Arte and I smell the odours of the Venetian campiello in the midst of a square in Thimphu.

Patches and phallus

The brash red attire is spattered with patches. Harlequin again appears ... the Atsara mingle with the spectators, taunting them, miming and pronouncing audacious indecencies that range from coprophilia to pornography, desecrating religion, the monks and the estabilshment. They are completely mad ergo they can say and do anything. 

They have enormous phalli on their heads attached to their headwear and they carry a wooden phallus with the sole objective of traumatizing the ladies in the audience. They even venture amongst the audience, and mime expicit coital acts in their midst.

Let’s not forget that the relation bewteen actor and spectator in Bhutan is very different from that of the West. Here there is no stage, theatre seats or proscenium which guarantee the division of the two. The public sits, stands or hunches in the courtyard of the dzong, occupying three quarters of the rectangular performance area. They sit on mats and munch on betel nut, the children are free to run as they please, often directly towards the actor of interest. The actors themselves have an almost physical relationship with the audience which becomes by necessity an integral part of the spectacle.

The enormous phallus of Zanni from the Commedia dell’Arte, brash and provocative, seems to hold the same significance as for our Bhutanese brothers. The phallus can be found everywhere, painted on the walls of houses, hanging above the entrance or an elegant furniture piece in the living room. 

I would like to use the Atsara in the scenes with Polyphemus where they would appear as two arrogant and brazen scullions. Polyphemus’ second aria ‘Cease to beauty’ is actually a revision of a censured text originally written by John Gay, copied into the original manuscript by Handel and then cancelled. The verses read:

Who would bear a woman's toying, 

  Who would be a whining lover? 

Force her if she's worth enjoying, 

  She'll forgive you when 'tis over.

Hmmm 

We would like to use this version and we hope to witness a natural reaction by the Atsara to Polyphemus’ song. I only hope, being naughty and deceptive characters, that they don’t start doing things that this pedantic director didn’t tell them to do!