Theatre & Alchemy Laboratory

Enrique Pardo is a theatre director, performer, writer,and visual artist. Born in Peru in 1946, he went to school in France, studied painting at the Chelsea School of Art, and taught Fine Arts at Goldsmith College, University of London. He joined the Roy Hart Theatre in 1968, a utopian avant-garde company known for its radical voice work, with which he moved to Malerargues, Southern France, in 1875. In 1878, he founded Pantheatre (from Pan, the dancer-singer god), which he co-directs with his partner, Linda Wise. Enrique has collaborated with a wide array of artists, thinkers, and psychotherapists. One of his main intellectual sources of inspiration is the post-Jungian psychologist James Hillman, father of archetypal psychology, with whom he created the Myth and Theatre Festival in 1986. Enrique directs and teaches choreographic theatre and voice performance, weaving together movement and dance, music, voice and singing, with a complex poetical approach to the inclusion of text, which he describes as « Cubist, as in Cuba », that is, closer to voodoo than to formal cubes.

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Linda Wise is an actor, director, and voice coach. Linda grew up in Kenya and trained as an actress in Scotland at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. Linda worked the Roy Hart Theatre, an avant-garde company known for its radical approach to voice work from 1969 and was one of the founders of the Roy Hart Centre in France. She currently directs, with Enrique Pardo, Pantheatre, which they founded in 1978. Linda has performed, taught, and directed shows around the world. She has taught voice work at national theatre schools in Denmark,Norway, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Argentina, Scotland, and France. She performed Nedda in the Roy Hart Theatre’s OBIE winning performance of“Pagliacci” and later directed “Moby Dick” Prix Jean Vilar. She has directed a series of solos (Cassandra, The Song of Songs, Granade, Les sybilles) as well as a jazz-opera “Overflaten” in Norway, an immersive theatre piece in NY“ Inside the Wild Heart”. Her latest piece “the Invader’s Fear of Memories”, written and performed by Ben Rivers, premiered in Johannesburg in 2023.

Swan Alyon, PhD, is a theatre practitioner and psychotherapist as well as the founder and director of the Institute of Devotional Arts. After studying philosophy and theology in Melbourne, Oxford, and Chicago, Swan wrote their thesis on processes of individual and social transformation at the University of Cambridge where they worked as a supervisor and published articles on ethics and comparative religion. They trained at the Jacques Lecoq school of physical theatre and explored various forms of alternative theatre such as applied drama, paratheatre, psychomagic, and drama therapy. They also hold certificates in tantra yoga, breathwork, and hypnotherapy. Swan guides individuals and groups and curate seminars, retreats, art residencies in Europe and North America.

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