Las Metamorfosis

Las metamorfosis by Ovid is an inventory of the transformation myths that – 2,000 years ago – challenged the idea of a permanent division between what’s human and what’s not. Specifically – and problematically – though, the majority of these transformations turn out to be the result of violence aimed at women. A critical look at Ovid’s poem provides a more in-depth exploration of how the notion of ‘human’ became part of the foundations of Western culture by making forms of expulsion and sexual violence - reaffirmed for years in Western art history - more aesthetic.

Either as a form of escape or punishment, nymphs and women turn into cows, trees and rivers, losing their ability to speak. This adaptation of Las metamorfosis by Manuela Infante and Michael de Cock, however, doesn’t aim to ‘give them a voice’ or restore their human ones but rather to question the worn-out metaphor of ‘voices’ as a form of agency.

In the play’s artificial, en-chanted landscape, voices are not an expression of privacy, reason or human agency but rather entities on the wind that weave together humans and non-humans in an unending stream of ventriloquism, reverberations and echoes. Without ever belonging to anyone, voices are dislocated, flee and are transformed.

Las metamorfosis is a collection of vampirized versions of Western foundational myths, working with voices – sung, murmured, stammered or squealed – to lay bare their inhuman otherness. It challenges the divisions that these very myths have reaffirmed for centuries – human and non-human, culture and nature, sound and meaning, man and woman.

Can the voices of rivers, trees, insects or animals act as a sonic threshold for other forms of – unexpected – eloquence, disrupting the borders of the territory we call ‘human’?

In this piece, Manuela Infante continues her collaboration with musician Diego Noguera, who she worked with on the play Idomeneo, exploring how to process voices using modular synthesizers. Las metamorfosis is a piece full of noise, with the whole sonic landscape and music emerging exclusively as a result of taking the performers’ voices and processing them live.