RITUAL FOR THE PEOPLE
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THE ORIGINATORS

Antero Alli in blue-tinted aviator sunglasses and a dark jacket, seated at an outdoor café table with his hands clasped, looking at the camera.

ANTERO ALLI

1952–2023

Arto Antero Alexander Alli was a Finnish astrologer, filmmaker, theatre director, and writer. He wrote esoteric books on experimental theatre, astrology and Timothy Leary’s 8-circuit model of consciousness, including Angel Tech and The Eight Circuit Brain.

Antero was born in Helsinki, Finland and migrated to North America at 3 years old. In 1977 he was inspired by the Paratheatre of Jerzy Grotowski to cultivate his own Paratheatrical medium which has been documented in three of his books All Rites Reversed, Towards an Archeology of the Soul and State of Emergence. For more than 40 years, Antero refined and explored these Ritual techniques, creating this framework to inform and inspire countless individuals. A documentary about the work can be found below.

Black-and-white photograph of Jerzy Grotowski smiling with his arms folded outside a theatre, a film camera and crew behind him.

JERZY GROTOWSKI

1933–1999

Grotowski built on Stanislavski’s work on the actor, where, as opposed to ‘acting’ out a role, the performer becomes the person or character they are portraying. Grotowski’s Paratheatre took this one step further by blurring the lines and pushing the physical boundaries between actor and audience.

In 1973 Grotowski published Holiday, which outlined a new course of investigation. He would pursue this ‘Paratheatrical’ phase until 1978. This phase is known as the ‘Paratheatrical’ phase of his career because it was an attempt to transcend the separation between performer and spectator. Grotowski attempted this through the organization of communal rites and simple interactive exchanges that went on sometimes for extended periods, attempting to provoke in poor participants a deconditioning of impulse. The most widely circulated description of one of these post-theatrical events (a “beehive”) is given by Andre Gregory, Grotowski’s longtime friend and the American director whose work he most strongly endorsed, in My Dinner With Andre. Various collaborators who had been important to Grotowski’s work in what he termed his “Theatre of Productions” phase had difficulty following him in these explorations beyond the boundary of conventional theatre. Theatre critics have often exoticized and mystified Grotowski’s work on the basis of these paratheatrical experiments, suggesting that his work should be seen in the lineage of Antonin Artaud, a suggestion Grotowski strongly resisted.