HOW IT ALL ENDS

September 2022
Small Stage, Basel Theater
Switzerland

The end has become such a common trope nowadays. Dystopian narratives about the end being close pop up like mushrooms. This is a show proposing a critical look at the concept of “the end”.

In Spanish the word “fin” has a double meaning, on the one hand it means “end”, but it also means “purpose”. In a way, the end gives a thing its purpose, it explains its use. The end is the moment of closure, of closure of sense, of sense making, it's the moment of synthesis. In this way, the end is a form of domestication of uncertainty. This work looks at how this implies a certain violence towards events, and beings: no being should come to its end, but remain becoming, their open-endedness, their ever exceeding dimensions. The idea of endings is an anthropocentric form of time domesticating. There is a normativity of “end”. The impossibility to understand events as not-closed, un resolved, as sense-less. This normativity, of course responds to a whole narrative of linear progress strongly disseminated by apocalyptic thinking and it´s secular version in teleology and the notion of progress.

A piece looking to question narrative structures -in fiction and also in reality- oriented towards closure, resolution and sense. Why are we so obsessed with saying we are at the end of something? What if we are more at the open-end of something? How useful are narratives of endings really to us today?

Credits

Director
Manuela Infante

Concept and Text
Manuela Infante

Guest Dramaturgy
Camila Francisca Valladares Farrú

Dramaturgy
Kris Merken

Cast
Elmira Bahrami, Marie Löcker and Gala Othero Winter

Stage Design
Rocío Hernandez

Costume Design
Viktoria Semperboni

Composition and Sound Design
Diego Noguera

Lighting Design
Stefan Erny, Roland Heid

Production: Theatre Basel

Trailer

mail

2025