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BENJAMIN VERDONCK

Anarchic, comically evil, but also bloody object theatre for time-critical people aged 12 and older.

Celebrated Belgian performance artist and object theatre player Benjamin Verdonck will work again for Kunstfest Weimar after his huge audience success in 2019 with four short plays. His project »All trees must fall!«, commissioned by the Kunstfest Weimar for audiences aged 12 and older, takes the ancient Greek creation myth about Mother Earth, Gaia, sky god Uranos and their youngest child, the titan Kronos, as its starting point, ending in bloodshed and an endless chain of betrayal, violence and self-interest.

Benjamin Verdonck also wants to "tell of the ups and owns of the world in which we now live." He describes his starting point as follows: "We cannot help but admit that we are incessantly mutilating the earth in such a way that it will probably no longer be worth living in for our children. So have we learned nothing since the ancient Greeks? [...] Or, conversely, must we face the fact that in human society there is no beauty without dirt [...], no joy of life without destructive strife? That it just always has been and always will be?"

»All trees must fall!« is an anarchic, comically evil object theatre in which the Greek creation story is told with the help of a sandbox, half a kilo of sausage and two buckets of (film) blood. In doing so, Verdonck, aware of the communist history of Weimar and Thur- ingia, tries to combine the traditional Marxist critique of capitalism in terms of its exploitation of the factor labor with the critique of the equally violent exploitation of animals, nature and the ecosystem.