A mysterious masked ball by Cynthia von Buhler exploring how modern science is creating animal-human hybrids
The 'Baron and Baroness de Rothschild' cordially invite you to
THE ILLUMINATI BALL
NEW YEAR'S EVE
OPEN BAR ALL NIGHT
A surreal immersive masquerade ball celebrating
The Year of The Pig.
For the past three years we've been holding intimate Illuminati Ball Immersive Excursions at secret locations. If you were lucky enough to attend one you know how wonderfully intense they are. Once per year we hold a much larger ball in New York City for one thousand carefully chosen guests. This year, the year of the pig, we chose New Year's Eve for our immersive gala and we are celebrating with an open bar all night long.
THE MASKING ROOM
Upon entry each guest will choose a unique mask in The Masking Room. Guests are welcome to keep this mask as a remembrance of this truly unforgettable evening.
THE DOMED BALLROOM
Once masked, our esteemed guests will be guided to the ballroom for the opening initiation ceremony. Two stages in the ballroom remain active all night long with risqué rituals, decadent dances, daring aerialists, and fearless fire performances
THE WANDERING ROOMS:
THE SIREN'S SPEAKEASY for LOVE
Presided over by chicken kinship leader Parthenope, her lair features a Greek mythology theme with sultry mermaids in a water tank and sexy sailors driven mad by their songs.
THE PUMPING STATION for BASIC NEEDS
A farmer invites guests to step up, place their hands into curtained boxes, and milk horned and hoofed maidens while looking directly into their eyes. Afterwards, guests may taste the delicious milk they helped produce. Nearby, cow kinship leader Kahmadhenu bathes in her breast milk which has been known to be the fountain of youth.
THE BANK VAULT for WEALTH
Our dear Pindar leader, Baron de Rothschild aka Pig King, allows selected guests to step into his vault where they can grab as much money as they can hold.
THE JEWELED JUNGLE for POWER
Presided over by monkey kinship leader Chumanzee this jungle offers guests a chance to pluck emeralds and diamonds from flowering vines in an African rainforest in order to bejewel and empower themselves.
THE MOUSE HOLE for RESPECT
Guests crawl into kinship leader Vacanti's mouse hole (which makes them feel physically small) for discussions that makes them feel big, truly listened to and understood.
THE ROTHSCHILD DINING ROOM for FAME - VIPS ONLY
VIPs do not wait on line to enter the ballroom, have first choice of the very best masks, and are part of their own initiation ceremony. They will be given a gift to wear which allows them access to the secret third floor for a delectable treat and exclusive immersive experiences.
12th December 1972, the year of Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisieand the night of Marie-Hélène’s own surrealist masterpiece. Invitations were sent out with the cryptic dress code “black tie, long dresses & surrealist heads”, the instructions typed backwards so they had to be read in a mirror. As guests arrived, the front of the chateau was floodlit as if it were on fire. Along the main staircase, servants and footmen dressed as cats pawed at each other and pretended to be asleep. On entry, guests were led into a maze, an immersive theatrical experience in a forest of cobweb ribbon full of dark surprises. If you got lost, you could call a cat to “help” you.
“Plates were covered in fur, tables decorated with taxidermied tortoises and food served on a mannequin corpse on a bed of roses.”
Eventually your cat-butler would show you through to dinner, where plates were covered in fur, tables decorated with taxidermied tortoises and food served on a mannequin corpse on a bed of roses. Forks were replaced with dead fish. Omnilingual cannibalistic puns littered the menu, “sir-loin” here, “extra-lucid” soup and (my favourite) goat’s cheese roasted in “post-coital sadness”.
We mustn’t forget the costumes. Marie-Hélène herself wore a giant stag’s head studded with tears of diamonds (real diamonds). Audrey Hepburn sported a relatively innocent cage filled with birds. Aesthete Baron Alexis de Redé wore an astonishing quadruple-decker four-masks-in-one number freckled with scarab beetles, an Egyptian twist on Titian’s Allegory of Prudence. Salvador Dalí designed several of the costumes, but didn’t wear one himself. Perfumer Hélène Rochas wore a gramophone on her head. Art references were two a penny. One guest wore an apple in front of her face, a nod to Magritte’s The Son of Man; another wore a chopped up collage of Mona Lisa’s. The presence of supermodel Marisa Berenson, star of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, foreshadows Kubrick’s final film Eyes Wide Shut and its dreamlike mists of secrecy, opulence and sex. Three years after their unrepeatable Surrealist Ball, the Rothschilds donated the chateau to the chancellery of the universities of Paris (now a gastronomic school) and moved to the house they had built in its woods.
Few parties are genuine works of art, but the Rothschilds’ 1972 ball sounds and looks like it came close. Semi-curated by the founder of surrealism and played out by the leading ladies of the day, it was (like Buñuel’s seventies films) a self-satirising social labyrinth, a Garden of Earthly Delights in a secret forest, endless immersive theatre avant la lettre. Thank God for the rest us someone took a camera.
