Metamorphoses

Picture a voice.
It’s the cry of an animal.
Made by a machine.
That’s my voice.

Picture my mouth, it has no tongue.
This is my voice with no tongue.
It speaks in tongues.

Does that scare you? What a beast I am.
You see, a voice will never be
something to own.

Two thousand years ago, the Roman poet Ovid wrote his masterpiece Metamorphoses. It’s a wonderful book, full of mystery, but at the same time also a book in which women and nymphs are chased by men and transformed into stones, water, animals. Manuela Infante’s new work starts from a question: how is the concept of human being produced in these stories? By creating an Otherness and attaching women to it, the human becomes a privileged place for men. Still, the beauty of these texts is that all the ingredients needed to approach the world in a completely different way are already within them. In Metamorphoses, Infante seeks out the border dividing human from non-human, and then crosses it. By vampirizing these outdated and fabricated categories, the author opens new contemporary ways to deal with ancient literature.

BIO
Manuela Infante is a Chilean stage author, director, scriptwriter and musician. She brought her works to America, Europe and Asia and is known for her scenic approach to complex theoretical subjects, focusing on the non-human dimension. She has been sharing her fascination with Ovid with Michael De Cock, artistic director of KVS and author of several adaptations of classical texts.