METAMORPHOSES

Julio 2021,
KVS
Brussels, Belgium

Ovid's Metamorphoses is a kind of inventory of transformation myths, which—already 2,000 years ago—challenged the idea of a stable boundary dividing the human from the non-human. But what is unusual—and problematic—is that these transformations mostly result from scenes of violence against women. A critical look at Ovid's poem allows us to further explore how the notion of the "human" was established in the foundations of Western culture through the aestheticization of forms of expulsion and sexual violence reiterated for centuries in the history of Western art.

Through escape or as punishment, nymphs and women transformed into cows, trees, and rivers lose their ability to speak. However, Manuela Infante and Michael de Cock's adaptation of The Metamorphoses does not seek to "give them voice" or recover their human voices. Rather, it seeks to question the oft-used metaphor of "the voice" as a sign of agency.

In the work's artificial enchanted landscape, the voice is not an expression of interiority, reason, or human agency, but rather an entity borrowed from the wind, entangling humans and nonhumans in endless ventriloquisms, reverberations, and echoes. Never belonging to anyone, the voice dislocates, flees, and transforms.

The Metamorphoses is a weaving of vampirized versions of Western founding myths, where the work with voices—sung, murmured, babbled, or squeaky—will reveal the inhuman otherness of the voice, unsettling the divisions that these very myths have been reiterating for centuries: human and nonhuman, culture and nature, sound and meaning, male and female.

Can the voice of the river, the tree, the insect, or the animal be a sonic threshold toward other, unforeseen forms of eloquence that trouble the borders of that territory called "human"?

@DannyWillems

Credits

Direction
Manuela Infante

Original text
Ovidio

Concept and dramaturgy
Manuela Infante

Adaptation
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

Dramatic consultant
Kristin Rogghe

Artistic assistant
Dina Dooreman

Lighting operator
Rocío Hernández

Sound operator
Isabel Zúñiga

Video operator
Jorge Velis

Costume design
Nancy Colman

General production
Tanja Vrancken

Production
Carmina Infante

Translation
Anne Vanderschueren (FR)

Subtitles
Inge Floré

A KVS production

Co-production: Teatro a Mil Foundation, La rose des vents - Scène Nationale Lille Métropole Villeneuve d'Ascq

With the support of Vlaamse Overheid, Région Hauts-de-France.

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2025