Dying Together
Dying Together is about thinking with bodies, about life. The three performances invite the audience to represent people, animals or things during moments of collective death. The actors act as guides, who, together with the audience, build constellations based on moments of collective death. Aiming to inhabit them anew, in the abstract theatre space, confronts us with the limits of representation and the value of death, life and collectivity. Each of the independent performances focuses on different forms of togetherness.
Humans
Dying Together Humans explores the crash of Germanwings flight 9525, the capsizing of a boat near the Italian island Lampedusa and the terrorist attack on the Bataclan nightclub in Paris focusing on human togetherness.
Earth
Dying Together Earth explores the mad cow disease breakout in the UK, the transformation of the Amazonian ecosystem by large scale agro-business and the suicide of a Japanese businessman in a forest, focusing on more-than-human togetherness.
Futures
Dying Together Futures is responding to current affairs, forecasts, and the performance venue, exploring how entwined ideas about the future and mortality shape our togetherness.
In Dying Together you enter a different world, a limbo between life and death which puts you in a state of wakefulness. In the form of large-scale constellations, the audience undergoes three situations of dying together. This results in a unique experience in which you are yourself but also not, in which you watch yourself and your instinctive reactions, but also those of the other participants. Lotte van den Berg takes us on another journey to the limits of theatre and the hear of being a human.
Rainer Hofmann (Director, SPRING festival).
Archive of Reflections
I want to be in a forest instead of a theatre. I intensely reject the plastic floor I am lying on, representing an alga.
(Anon, 11 07 2019, Amsterdam)
I look at the people around me. I imagine how it would be to all die together, here in Nanterre on this spring day. I try to remember all the faces. I want to hug the people in front of me, to give them my hand, to hold them. But I do nothing. I do not move. I observe. I smile at a woman who reminds me of my mother. I touch her shoulder. Nothing more.
(Anon, 31 03 2019, Nanterre)
After each performance, the audience contributes to the growing Dying Together Archive of Reflections. You can find the complete archive of reflections at archiveofreflections.nl. New reflections will be added to the archive within three days after new performances.
The brochure below presents a selection of reflections from performances taking place in Brussels, Nanterre, Kortrijk, Amsterdam, Manchester and Bochum during 2019.
