21.5.15

Baaljartze

Pronounced "ball-YAR-tzuh": an unsettling word denoting a form of theatre briefly popular in pre-Nazi Bohemia, explicitly written for the devil.

Orgies, animal sacrifice, blood-drinking, and the rest of Satanism's drear catalogue featured prominently in the work of this radical theatre group artistically and philosophically triangulated in the humid, teeming crotch connecting Brecht to Artaud. According to sources, the Baaljartzers claimed for their artistic godfathers (my word) an apocryphal splinter group from Exodus, who did not shall-we-say cotton to Moses's Commandments, preferring to plow greasier soils.

The founding philosopher and director of the Baaljartze movement, a sepulchral woman called only "Weis", was famous for saying that the entire human spectrum of existence was theatre for the devil; her only gripe being that it was cast with amateurs.

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