Blind Submission: Reliving the Exquisite Corpse

Blind Submission is a theatrical creation inspired by the parlor game fashioned by Surrealist Poets called “Exquisite Corpse”. In the game, each person scratches a few words onto a paper without having seen what the last person wrote. The result is a poem that represents the collective unconscious of the group. The name is derived from a phrase when the game was first played in 1925, “Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau.” (The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine.)

For the theatre, the Chaos Collective has adapted the game with a postmodern, deconstructivist twist, creating their own form of Surreality Theatre. For 28 days, three playwrights, in three different cities, wrote three separate plays. Without a previously determined theme, without really knowing each other, and without having seen each other’s words, the playwrights blindly submitted their scripts to the dramaturge. The dramaturge has collaged the pieces together to create theatre that is honest, beautiful and vulnerable.