Chilean playwright, director, dramatist, and musician of international fame, Manuela Infante has been working for years on the boundaries of the human and the non-human to crush them in a show of non-anthropocentric theatre. With the KVS of Brussels, Infante produced Metamorphoses, a piece of theatre that elaborates on Ovid and questions whether voice is an exclusively human attribute.
Ovid wrote the Metamorphoses over two thousand years ago. It is a masterpiece of mystery as well as a piece of literature that depicts women and nymphs being chased by men, losing their voice, and turning into stone, water, animals… Infante’s piece, instead, starts with a question: how does the concept of ‘human’ enter these stories? Why is nature is a territory that stands on its own? And why are women so easily banned into this otherness, or wilderness? By inventing an alterity and associating it with women, ‘human’ seems to be a privileged place accessible to men only. Aren’t these same distinctions the bases men use to categorize, colonize, exploit, and appropriate?
Manuela Infante creates an enchanted sound landscape where voice is something that exists beyond the human: it has been borrowed from wind, it breathes into humans and non-humans in ventriloquist fashion, with endless refrains and echoes, without ever belonging fully to anyone or anything.