Kris Verdonck & Kristof van Baarle: 19 - 24 May, 2022
Belgian theatre director Kris Verdonck and dramaturg Kristof van Baarle stayed at Plumwood Mountain in May 2022, whilst developing their noh-style theatre work PREY.
Kris Verdonck and Kristof van Baarle (Clancy Walker, 2022)
“PREY is a music theatre production by Kris Verdonck / A Two Dogs Company and Muziektheater Transparant with original music by Annelies Van Parys, in co-production with Klarafestival and Theater Rotterdam and in collaboration with Ictus ensemble.”
“How can we change the way we view being human from a radical ecological perspective? What stories help us to better understand the disruptions caused by the climate crisis? These questions are at the heart of PREY. And perhaps our own mortality and vulnerability provide a good starting point for the search for an answer.”
“PREY consists of three solos by three generations of women. Each has its own focus: text/language, song/music and dance/performance. With every solo, the tension between the human and the landscape, performer and scenography, becomes more intense and intimate. The essence of PREY is finding solace in the frightening fact that we too are food, that we too belong to an ecological cycle of life and death.”
“PREY starts from this unimaginable crocodile story and builds on two core ideas from Plumwood's oeuvre. First, there is the statement, ''We are food.'' Her encounter with the crocodile was a clear reminder that humans are a species that is also part of the food chain. Indeed, it is the dynamic of eating and being eaten that can reconnect us Westerners to our environment. Ecology, for her, is one big feast, to live is to be prey: a powerful antidote to fantasies of immortality and exclusivity.”
Read more about this work at Verdonck’s A Two Dogs Company website: https://www.atwodogscompany.org/en/projects/prey/
PREY
31.03.23 - Theater Rotterdam, Rotterdam
26.03.23 - Théâtre Varia, Brussels
25.03.23 - Théâtre Varia, Brussels
Kris crosses a mossy log (Clancy Walker, 2022)
Kristof and Kris look back onto the Plumwood grove (Clancy Walker, 2022)