The starting point of this hallucinatory fable for three performers is the scarecrow, this vertical being, absurd and fluttering in the winds that hold it between earth and sky. The scarecrow also haunts this piece, but in secret, hidden. In this trio we find all the ingredients that typify the original flavour of the work by this Belgian choreographer: a fabulous atmosphere, a strange comic tenderness tinged with profound doubt, sculptures of men, acrobatics, the use of objects and short films projected on stage, all expertly woven together. Here, the graphic score by Stefano Ricci, author of the illustrated book Humus vertebra, portrays hybrid characters, apparitions somewhere between man and beast. A fragile, yet clear trace of poetry of the moment inside an illusion: the uncertainty of being.
THE SCARECROW
A poet of ancient times who still reigns from the corner of the field, it is difficult to describe the scarecrow: an impostor, a bogeyman, an ogre, a phantom, a protester, a crucifix, a no-through sign, a tower, an hourglass…
For me, a scarecrow is both a touching and contradictory figure, a lonely soldier of terror who has never scared anyone. He belongs to the imagination. This vertical being is man’s double, a self-portrait that does not speak its name, a no-through sign, and a protester who opens his arms to us when he is not hanged, crucified or bound.
This is a being of abandonment, in abandonment.
Giving life to a scarecrow is to become alive again, to revive, reconstruct, and to relearn. Trying to reach that place where the dual movement of vertical falling and elevation is produced, a contradiction vital to a living being.
The difficult birth of a body and a word that are linked and which begin over and over again, in perpetuity.
This project is the deconstruction and the match of the characters created on the same theme in the solos “babil”, “Fidèle à l’éclair” and “havran”. Out of their initial context, they slide into a second skin, and end up together in this performance, Humus vertebra.
