Theatre Of Moths, Men... and Women
...still on a theatre wave and, if you can, for story telling prowess alone, see Book Burning ... Also see it for the intricate and beautiful installation that unfolds from a huge trunk along with the story, and which itself can be viewed on stage afterwards. This is a utopian, dystopian narrative: a fable fashioned out of the past decade and told in wonderfully circuitous and quirky form by Pieter De Buysser. It is about Sebastian, a friend of the narrator who, having been injured in a factory accident, is emitting an escalating dazzling light that causes him to be shrouded in moths and develop particular skills.
Although this is an unmistakably continental European production, and is performed tirelessly as well as told, the underlying narrative reflects a distinct current prevailing thought system linking bravery of the ancients (Alexander the Great, Ulysses) with contemporary politics of Wikileaks, Bradley (sic) Manning and Edward Snowden. "Nobody"'s victory over Polyphemus, the cyclops, is linked with the Occupy movement, and additionally, with today's so-called nobodies disaffected with the political and economic mainstream. The innovation of technology and the might of its structural algorithms are a direct expression of the human brain's ability to confound presumptions: the wild card at the core of life.
These heroic inherited DNA forces are presented as both inspiration and justification for a call to overthrow blind acceptance of "corporativ-ism" - Pieter De Buysser's own word - meaning a way of life which he likens to fascism. It culminates in a book burning, but in this case the burning is of the presumptions of those -whether well disposed or not - who seek to write our future according to their own intrinsically limited predictions.
In the fable, the agent of change is Thilde, daughter of Sebastian, whose mother died tragically young, leaving her to be almost exclusively influenced by her doting if controlling father, and then, crucially, by a young goat herd lover - a creature of the mountains, forest and nature, who acts as an inadvertent enabler to her following her own code which includes inspiring others to do likewise.