A queer folktale about the return of the ancient screaming root
Erik Peters
Location: Treehouse NDSM, Paviljoen
- GENRE: Multimedia performance, Performance Art, Storytelling
- THEME: History Re-told, More than human, Queer Stories
- LANGUAGE: English
- ACCESSIBILITY: Assistance dogs welcome, Genderneutral toilets, Toilet for wheelchair users, Wheelchair accessible
info
What happens when the landscape screams back? Is her haunting voice loud enough to make the forest tremble? Mandragora is a contemporary folk tale: a joyful act of transformation and the queer resistance of unstable bodies.
The ancient legacy of the mandrake root – a unique plant-human hybrid – spans thousands of years of history. From Mesopotamia to the Middle Ages, her magical and medicinal properties were harnessed and traded across Europe and beyond. When the church and state systematically erased healers and their communities during the medieval witch hunt, they also severed the rootsongs of care and knowledge to the land, and weeded botanical ecologies associated with magic.
The mandragora slowly disappeared from recorded history, but never left the soil. On stage, uprooted and uplifted, her catchy songs weave a tale as old as the earth herself: of empires and spells, of love and resistance.
Biography
Erik Peters is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher engaging with the worldbuilding potentialities seeded in the act of storytelling, uncovering how speculative fiction can germinate new universes of being. Through collaborative formats of making, researching and staging, they explore queer ecology as a roadmap to the possible worlds emerging from a world in planetary crises.
credits
Sound design: Lance Laoyan
Visuals: Deborah Mora
Costume: Jip van der Hek
Photo credit: Cian Redmond (@cianay)