LA REVELACIÓN
THE REVELATION
By Leo Bassi
192 pages
Publication date: 2007
ISBN: 978-84-95764-60-7
Retail price: 20 € (including VAT)
Our times are marked by a paradox of far-reaching consequences. The country that has done most in the last century to roll back the bounds of human knowledge and to develop what could be the benefits of technology has gone mad and has taken to preaching obscurantism. The power of the American fundamentalist evangelists is not very well known in Europe but it is now a major political force in the United States. They own big television channels and newspapers and are able to exert a direct influence over American society. According to Gallup Poll figures, 72% of American adults assert that the Bible teaches the origins of the universe, while 45% believe that God created man less than ten thousand years ago. These findings shed light on the incredible fact that one of the big issues being fought out in US courts today is whether schoolchildren should be taught Darwin and evolutionary theory.
European society has so far managed to live without paying too much attention to such aberrations but now the symptoms are starting to rear their heads here too. It is not just that the Catholic Church has forgotten all about Vatican II or that Allah has been radicalised, but the secular world has been unable to renovate its ideas so that we can dream. It is right here, in this vacuum, where ignorance thrives along with the facile responses that are demolishing centuries of political and philosophical struggles to free ourselves of the asphyxiating love of a totalitarian God.
Clowns belong to an ancient institution and are also an essential part of the secular tradition and now they are in the firing line as darkness descends. Leo Bassi has therefore decided to take the battle into the heart of the enemy camp, challenging all the demonising theologies with La Revelación. In the name of Reason, let Faith tremble.
Six generations ago, one of Leo Bassi’s ancestors fought with Garibaldi before going on to create one of Tuscany’s first modern circuses. More recently, his father, Leo Bassi Sr., a renowned juggler, worked in the United States (where Leo was born in 1952) with such notable artists as Groucho Marx, Louis Armstrong and Ed Sullivan. Leo’s forebears have passed on to him all the tricks of the trade but, rather than continuing in the theatre tradition, his present aim is to keep alive the provocative and freewheeling spirit that has always been the hallmark of the Bassi family. For Leo, entertaining is a passionate, sensational and disturbing experience. Leo Bassi has something special. Hence, it is hardly surprising that he is constantly being caught up in amazing events and absurd, comical and even dangerous situations such as the following: on 1 March 2006, a worker in the theatre where La Revelación was being staged found an incendiary bomb. The fuse had been lit and the device had been placed on a pile of thousands of old posters that had been liberally sprayed with petrol. The would-be fire-bomber was never caught. In 2005, in Rio de Janeiro, Leo mingled among a crowd of five thousand fervent evangelists, holding aloft a placard announcing, “I don’t believe in God but in philosophers and science. Long Live Socrates!” Amid shouts of “Burn him at the stake!” he was miraculously rescued by the police. In Uzbekistan, in 1991, he presented himself as the EEC’s Vice-Minister from the Ministry of Laughs and was so convincing that he ended up giving a lecture to over 3,000 students on “Laughter and the Free Market”.