Adaptación Michael de Cock
Country: Chile | Belgium | France
Discipline: Theater | Performance | Music
Duration: 90 minutes
Recommended for: + 14
Language: English with Spanish subtitles
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.
DIRECCIÓN Y DRAMATURGIA
Manuela Infante
Chilean theater director, playwright, scriptwriter and musician. MA in Cultural Analysis at University of Amsterdam. She is well known for offering scenic articulations of contemporary theoretical issues. With her group Teatro de Chile (2002-2016) she wrote and directed work with the permanent support of the Chilean Funds for the Arts. ...
ADAPTACIÓN
Michael de Cock
Born in 1972 in Belgium, this theater director, playwright and writer is currently the artistic director of the KVS Theater in Brussels. He graduated in Romance Languages and Literature and as an interpreter from the Brussels Conservatory. His work has been translated into more than ten languages and some of ...
CAST & CREW
Directed by: Manuela Infante | Original text: Ovid | Concept and script: Manuela Infante | Adapted by: Michael de Cock and Manuela Infante | Cast: Hannah Berrada, Luna de Boos, Jurgen Delnaet | Music: Diego Noguera | Set and lighting design: Andrés Poirot | Audiovisual design: Pablo Mois | Script consultant: Kristin Rogghe | Lighting technician: Rocio Hernandez | Sound technician: Isabel Zuñiga | Audiovisual technician: Jorge Velis | Wardrobe: Nancy Colman | Stage director: Dina Dooreman | General producer: Tanja Vrancken | Producer: Carmina Infante | Translator: Anne Vanderschueren (FR) | Subtitles: Inge Floré | A KVS Production | Coproduced by: the Teatro a Mil Foundation, La Rose des Vents - Scène Nationale Lille Métropole Villeneuve d’Ascq | Supported by Vlaamse Overheid, Hauts-de-France Region.
Related Plays
Material request