Lecture Manuela Infante

Manuela Infante is a Chilean playwright, director, screen writer and musician. Having earned a BA in Theatre Studies, and an MA in Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, Manuela Infante is well known for offering scenic articulations of complex theoretical issues. She understands theater not (only) as a place for telling stories, but as a laboratory for a sort of embodied philosophy making. She creates her own performances, which she tours in America, Europe and Asia. Last spring she brought her play Estado Vegetal to KVS, this time she is here to tell us more about her upcoming creation: Metamorphosis. 

For years now Manuela has been working in resonance with the ideas of a current of thought sometimes labeled as the “non-human turn”. Taking on the task of envisioning how to make a non-anthropocentric theatre, she has explored several scenic strategies in order to question the notion of the human from post-colonial and gender perspectives. Her polyphonic monologue Estado Vegetal or 'Vegetative State' (2017) investigated plants looking into the uncanny or impossible dialogue between humans and plants. 

Ovid´s Metamorphoses is a sort of inventory of transubstantiation myths, that already -2000 years ago- challenged this idea of a fixed boundary dividing human from non-human, or in human. But what is particular about the transformations in Metamorphosis is that they result mostly from scenes of violence and rupture. Ovid´s poem allows us to explore further how the notion of the human was established at the foundations of western culture, and how its boundaries were policed then, and are still policed now. Who is allowed to pertain to the privileged terrain of the human? And who will have to flee into others?